“He was neither good looking nor ugly, and while he would not have turned a young girl's head, someone older might have been struck by his face and the evidence of passion which had left its traces. ~p17”

“I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone's nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.”

“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.”

“If she had seen his face when, safe in his own room, he looked at the picture of a severe and rigid young lady, with a good deal of hair, who appeared to be gazing darkly into futurity, it might have thrown some light upon the subject, especially when he turned off the gas, and kissed the picture in the dark.”

“I left him thinking it over. If I were a bookie, I should feel justified in offering a hundred to eight against.""You can't have approached him properly. I might have known you would muck it up," said young Bingo. Which, considering what I had been through for his sake, struck me as a good bit sharper than the serpent's tooth.”

“My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.”