“He wondered if his own child would like tohave a dog, then shook off the thought. He was yearsaway from having a child. He needed a wife first—andobtaining her would be far more trouble than obtaininga mistress. Here, he had yet to get a mistress.”

“He would not have been the first man to find that he loved his wife more when he was parted from her than was with her, and that the expectation of sexual congress was more exciting than the realisation.”

“She carried herself like a queen,: gracefully, regal, and dignified. She was all woman and every inch a lady, and he had never seen her equal, not even in Paris. He was thinking she would make the perfect mistress, but at the same time, he wonder if she would accept such a role. Beautiful, arousing, and complicated meant nothing but trouble.-Alysandir”

“But all he could think of was what Sabina would have said about it. Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done. It was a perfectly innocent form of infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who would never have done his bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the cult of Sabina more as a religion than as love”

“For years, every conversation she had with a man had been colored by calculation. Would she put him off is she spoke her mind? What did he want her to say? When a man took a mistress, he purchased not just the rights to her body, but the content of her thoughts. Sir Mark wanted her as she was, not as he wished her to be. The thought made her head hurt.”

“Leto turned a hard stare at Kynes. And Kynes, returning the stare, found himself troubled by a fact he had observed here: This Duke was concerned more over the men than he was over the spice. He risked his own life, and that of his son to save the men. He passed off the loss of a spice crawler with a gesture. The threat to men's lives had him in a rage. A leader such as that would command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat.Against his own will and all previous judgements, Kynes admitted to himself: I like this Duke.”