“Madame Arnauld made a little face. 'I did not think they were so aristocratic,' she said, 'even if they come from Boston, which is supposed to be the most refined place in America.”

“Why should we all act so like children? Because we are? Yes, I suppose so." She made a humorous grimace. "But even then, why?" She pondered this for some time. "I suppose it was worth while-all those things I made-in a way," she mused, "and I suppose I wouldn't have made them, otherwise." She looked doubtful. "Is that it? So we will do the things that would not seem worth while-if we stopped to think?"...Yes, that was it!”

“I can’t even think about what life “couldhave been” like in Boston, without crying. It’s like deja-vu, I don’t think meand Boston were ever meant to be.”

“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”

“You were true to her, even if she was not to you. Never repent of your own goodness, child. To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of great strength.”“Strength,” she said with a little laugh. “I gave her strength, and look what she did with it.”

“She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.”