“…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…”

“How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.”

“But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.”

“I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is."And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.The old trouble; things won't fit."What things?"The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't."Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?"In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I."George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow.”

“Eccolo!” he exclaimed.At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her…”

“I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.”

“Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged--well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in--to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...”