As she glanced around the sitting-room of her apartment in Paris one
September morning she found it difficult, in some respects, to realize
that she had lived in it for more than five years. After Chiltern's
death she had sought a refuge, and she had found it here: a refuge in
which she meant--if her intention may be so definitely stated--to pass
the remainder of her days.
As a refuge it had become dear to her. When first she had entered it she
had looked about her numbly, thankful for walls and roof, thankful for
its remoteness from the haunts of the prying: as a shipwrecked castaway
regards, at the first light, the cave into which he has stumbled into
the darkness-gratefully. And gradually, castaway that she felt herself
to be, she had adorned it lovingly, as one above whose horizon the sails
of hope were not to rise; filled it with friends not chosen in a day,
whose faithful ministrations were not to cease. Her books, but only
those worthy to be bound and read again; the pictures she had bought
when she had grown to know what pictures were; the music she had come to
love for its eternal qualities--these were her companions.
The apartment was in the old quarter across the Seine, and she had found
it by chance. The ancient family of which this hotel had once been the
home would scarce have recognized, if they had returned the part of it
Honora occupied. The room in which she mostly lived was above the
corner of the quiet street, and might have been more aptly called
a sitting-room than a salon. Its panels were the most delicate of
blue-gray, fantastically designed and outlined by ribbings of blue.
Some of them contained her pictures. The chairs, the sofas, the little
tabourets, were upholstered in yellow, their wood matching the panels.
Above the carved mantel of yellowing marble was a quaintly shaped mirror
extending to the high ceiling, and flanked on either side by sconces.
The carpet was a golden brown, the hangings in the tall windows yellow.
And in the morning the sun came in, not boisterously, but as a well-bred
and cheerful guest. An amiable proprietor had permitted her also to add
a wrought-iron balcony as an adjunct to this room, and sometimes she sat
there on the warmer days reading under the seclusion of an awning,
or gazing at the mysterious facades of the houses opposite, or at
infrequent cabs or pedestrians below.
An archway led out of the sitting-room into a smaller room, once the
boudoir of a marquise, now Honora's library. This was in blue and gold,
and she had so far modified the design of the decorator as to replace
the mirrors of the cases with glass; she liked to see her books. Beyond
the library was a dining room in grey, with dark red hangings; it
overlooked the forgotten garden of the hotel.
One item alone of news from the outer world, vital to her, had drifted
to her retreat. Newspapers filled her with dread, but it was from a
newspaper, during the first year of her retirement, that she had learned
of the death of Howard Spence. A complication of maladies was mentioned,
but the true underlying cause was implied in the article, and this had
shocked but not surprised her. A ferment was in progress in her own
country, the affairs of the Orange Trust Company being investigated, and
its president under indictment at the hour of his demise. Her feelings
at the time, and for months after, were complex. She had been moved
to deep pity, for in spite of what he had told her of his business
transactions, it was impossible for her to think of him as a criminal.
That he had been the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a
question in her mind how clearly he had perceived the immorality of his
course, and of theirs. He had not been given to casuistry, and he had
been brought up in a school the motto of which he had once succinctly
stated: the survival of the fittest. He had not been, alas, one of those
to survive.
Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their
relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did
not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had
done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another
man, she acknowledged freely. Wrong as she knew this to have been,
severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring
herself to an adequate penitence. She tried to remember him as he had
been at Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not
as he had afterwards become. There was no question in her mind, now that
it was given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried
harder, much harder, to make their marriage a success. He might, indeed,
have done more to protect and cherish her. It was a man's part to guard
a woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded. On the
other hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape
it, that she had had the more light of the two: and that, though the
task were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and
infuse him with it.
That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point. Many of
her hours were spent in retrospection. She was, in a sense, as one dead,
yet retaining her faculties; and these became infinitely keen now that
she was deprived of the power to use them as guides through life. She
felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old.
And she contemplated the Honora of other days--of the flesh, as though
she were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly
regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it
had been animated and led to destruction.
Even Hugh Chiltern had left her no illusions. She thought of him at
times with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she
could not say. She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense
feeling had been burned out of her. And she found that she could permit
her mind to rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a
sense of horror; there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from
haunting terror, no day that had not added its mite to the gathering
evidence of an ultimate retribution. And it was like a nightmare to
summon again this spectacle of the man going to pieces under her
eyes. The whole incident in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect
bizarre, incredible, as the follies of a night of madness appear in the
saner light of morning. Her great love had bereft her of her senses, for
had the least grain of sanity remained to her she might have known that
the thing they attempted was impossible of accomplishment.
Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief. To
employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she
of all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and
thrown up on an island. What had she done above the others to deserve
preservation? It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to
herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the
vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his
telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests. Her escape had
indeed been miraculous!
Although they had passed through a ceremony, the conviction had never
taken root in her that she had been married to Chiltern. The tie that
had united her to him had not been sacred, though it had been no less
binding; more so, in fact. That tie would have become a shackle.
Her perception of this, after his death, had led her to instruct her
attorney to send back to his relatives all but a small income from his
estate, enough for her to live on during her lifetime. There had been
some trouble about this matter; Mrs. Grainger, in particular, had
surprised her in making objections, and had finally written a letter
which Honora received with a feeling akin to gratitude. Whether her own
action had softened this lady's feelings, she never understood; she
had cherished the letter for its unexpectedly charitable expressions.
Chiltern's family had at last agreed to accept the estate on the
condition that the income mentioned should be tripled. And to this
Honora had consented. Money had less value than ever in her eyes.
She lived here in Paris in what may be called a certain peace, made no
demands upon the world, and had no expectations from it. She was now in
half mourning, and intended to remain so. Her isolation was of her own
choice, if a stronger expression be not used. She was by no means an
enforced outcast. And she was even aware that a certain sympathy for her
had grown up amongst her former friends which had spread to the colony
of her compatriots in Paris; in whose numbers there were some, by no
means unrecognized, who had defied the conventions more than she. Hugh
Chiltern's reputation, and the general knowledge of his career, had no
doubt aided to increase this sympathy, but the dignity of her conduct
since his death was at the foundation of it. Sometimes, on her walks
and drives, she saw people bowing to her, and recognized friends or
acquaintances of what seemed to her like a former existence.
Such had been her life in Paris until a certain day in early September,
a month before this chapter opens. It was afternoon, and she was sitting
in the balcony cutting a volume of memoirs when she heard the rattle of
a cab on the cobbles below, and peered curiously over the edge of the
railing. Although still half a block away, the national characteristics
of the passenger were sufficiently apparent. He was an American--of that
she was sure. And many Americans did not stray into that quarter. The
length of his legs, for one thing, betrayed him: he found the seat of
the fiacre too low, and had crossed one knee over the other. Other
and less easily definable attributes he did not lack. And as he leaned
against the faded blue cushions regarding with interest the buildings
he passed, he seemed, like an ambassador, to convert the cab in which he
rode into United States territory. Then she saw that it was Peter Erwin.
She drew back her head from the balcony rail, and tried to sit still and
to think, but she was trembling as one stricken with a chill. The cab
stopped; and presently, after an interval, his card was handed her. She
rose, and stood for a moment with her hand against the wall before she
went into the salon. None of the questions she had asked herself were
answered. Was she glad to see him? and what would be his attitude
towards her? When she beheld him standing before her she had strength
only to pronounce his name.
He came forward quickly and took her hand and looked down into her
face. She regarded him tremulously, instinctively guessing the vital
importance of this moment for him; and she knew then that he had been
looking forward to it in mingled hope and dread, as one who gazes
seaward after a night of tempest for the ship he has seen at dusk in the
offing. What had the tempest done to her? Such was his question. And her
heart leaped as she saw the light growing in his eyes, for it meant much
to her that he should see that she was not utterly dismantled. She fell;
his own hand tremble as he relinquished hers. He was greatly moved; his
voice, too, betrayed it.
“You see I have found you,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered; “--why did you come?”
“Why have I always come to you, when it was possible?” he asked.
“No one ever had such a friend, Peter. Of that I am sure:'
“I wanted to see Paris,” he said, “before I grew too decrepit to enjoy
it.”
She smiled, and turned away.
“Have you seen much of it?”
“Enough to wish to see more.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Some time in the night,” he said, “from Cherbourg. And I'm staying at
a very grand hotel, which might be anywhere. A man I crossed with on the
steamer took me there. I think I'd move to one of the quieter ones,
the French ones, if I were a little surer of my pronunciation and the
subjunctive mood.”
“You don't mean to say you've been studying French!”
He coloured a little, and laughed.
“You think it ridiculous at my time of life? I suppose you're right.
You should have seen me trying to understand the cabmen. The way these
people talk reminds me more of a Gatling gun than anything I can think
of. It certainly isn't human.”
“Perhaps you have come over as ambassador,” she suggested. “When I saw
you in the cab, even before I recognized you, I thought of a bit of our
soil broken off and drifted over here.”
Her voice did not quite sustain the lighter note--the emotion his visit
was causing her was too great. He brought with him into her retreat not
so much a flood of memories as of sensations. He was a man whose image
time with difficulty obliterates, whose presence was a shining thing: so
she had grown to value it in proportion as she had had less of it. She
did inevitably recall the last time she had seen him, in the little
Western city, and how he had overwhelmed her, invaded her with doubts
and aroused the spirit which had possessed her to fight fiercely for its
foothold. And to-day his coming might be likened to the entrance of
a great physician into the room of a distant and lonely patient whom
amidst wide ministrations he has not forgotten. She saw now that he
had been right. She had always seen it, clearly indeed when he had been
beside her, but the spirit within her had been too strong, until
now. Now, when it had plundered her soul of treasures--once so little
valued--it had fled. Such were her thoughts.
The great of heart undoubtedly possess this highest quality of the
physician,--if the statement may thus be put backhandedly,--and Peter
Erwin instinctively understood the essential of what was going on within
her. He appeared to take a delight in the fancy she had suggested; that
he had brought a portion of the newer world to France.
“Not a piece of the Atlantic coast, certainly,” he replied. “One of the
muddy islands, perhaps, of the Mississippi.”
“All the more representative,” she said. “You seem to have taken
possession of Paris, Peter--not Paris of you. You have annexed the seat
of the Capets, and brought democracy at last into the Faubourg.”
“Without a Reign of Terror,” he added quizzically.
“If you are not ambassador, what are you?” she asked. “I have expected
at any moment to read in the Figaro that you were President of the
United States.”
“I am the American tourist,” he declared, “with Baedeker for my Bible,
who desires to be shown everything. And I have already discovered that
the legend of the fabulous wealth of the Indies is still in force here.
There are many who are willing to believe that in spite of my modest
appearance--maybe because of it--I have sailed over in a galleon
filled with gold. Already I have been approached from every side by
confidential gentlemen who announced that they spoke English--one of
them said 'American'--who have offered to show me many things, and who
have betrayed enough interest in me to inquire whether I were married or
single.”
Honora laughed. They were seated in the balcony by this time, and he had
the volume of memoirs on his knee, fingering it idly.
“What did you say to them?” she asked.
“I told them I was the proud father of ten children,” he replied. “That
seemed to stagger them, but only for a moment. They offered to take us
all to the Louvre.”
“Peter, you are ridiculous! But, in spite of your nationality, you don't
look exactly gullible.”
“That is a relief,” he said. “I had begun to think I ought to leave my
address and my watch with the Consul General....”
Of such a nature was the first insidious rupture of that routine she had
grown to look upon as changeless for the years to come, of the life she
had chosen for its very immutable quality. Even its pangs of loneliness
had acquired a certain sweet taste. Partly from a fear of a world that
had hurt her, partly from fear of herself, she had made her burrow deep,
that heat and cold, the changing seasons, and love and hate might be
things far removed. She had sought to remove comparisons, too, from the
limits of her vision; to cherish and keep alive, indeed, such regrets as
she had, but to make no new ones.
Often had she thought of Peter Erwin, and it is not too much to say that
he had insensibly grown into an ideal. He had come to represent to her
the great thing she had missed in life, missed by feverish searching in
the wrong places, digging for gold where the ground had glittered. And,
if the choice had been given her, she would have preferred his spiritual
to his bodily companionship--for a while, at least. Some day, when she
should feel sure that desire had ceased to throb, when she should have
acquired an unshakable and absolute resignation, she would see him. It
is not too much to say, if her feeling be not misconstrued and stretched
far beyond her own conception of it, that he was her one remaining
interest in the world. She had scanned the letters of her aunt and uncle
for knowledge of his doings, and had felt her curiosity justified by a
certain proprietorship that she did not define, faith in humankind,
or the lack of it, usually makes itself felt through one's comparative
contemporaries. That her uncle was a good man, for instance, had no such
effect upon Honora, as the fact that Peter was a good man. And that he
had held a true course had gradually become a very vital thing to her,
perhaps the most vital thing; and she could have imagined no greater
personal calamity now than to have seen him inconsistent. For there
are such men, and most people have known them. They are the men who,
unconsciously, keep life sweet.
Yet she was sorry he had invaded her hiding-place. She had not yet
achieved peace, and much of the weary task would have to be done over
after he was gone.
In the meantime she drifted with astounding ease into another existence.
For it was she, and not the confidential gentlemen, who showed Peter
Paris: not the careless, pleasure-loving Paris of the restaurants, but
of the Cluny and the Carnavalet. The Louvre even was not neglected, and
as they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter
his reply to the proffered services of the guide. Indeed, there was much
laughter in their excursions: his native humour sprang from the same
well that held his seriousness. She was amazed at his ability to strip
a sham and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which
she had never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had
given her. Some of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him
the greatest amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European
“personalities,” combinations of assumed indifference and effrontery,
and an accent the like of which was never heard before. But he was
neither bitter nor crude in his criticisms. He made her laugh, but he
never made her ashamed. His chief faculty seemed to be to give her the
power to behold, with astonishing clearness, objects and truths which
had lain before her eyes, and yet hidden. And she had not thought to
acquire any more truths.
The depth of his pleasure in the things he saw was likewise a
revelation to her. She was by no means a bad guide to the Louvre and the
Luxembourg, but the light in her which had come slowly flooded him with
radiance at the sight of a statue or a picture. He would stop with an
exclamation and stand gazing, self-forgetful, for incredible periods,
and she would watch him, filled with a curious sense of the limitations
of an appreciation she had thought complete. Where during his busy life
had he got this thing which others had sought in many voyages in vain?
Other excursions they made, and sometimes these absorbed a day. It was a
wonderful month, that Parisian September, which Honora, when she allowed
herself to think, felt that she had no right to. A month filled to the
brim with colour: the stone facades of the houses, which in certain
lights were what the French so aptly call bleuatre; the dense green
foliage of the horse-chestnut trees, the fantastic iron grills, the
Arc de Triomphe in the centre of its circle at sunset, the wide shaded
avenues radiating from it, the bewildering Champs Elysees, the blue
waters of the Seine and the graceful bridges spanning it, Notre Dame
against the sky. Their walks took them, too, into quainter, forgotten
regions where history was grim and half-effaced, and they speculated on
the France of other days.
They went farther afield; and it was given them to walk together down
green vistas cut for kings, to linger on terraces with the river far
below them, and the roofs of Paris in the hazy distance; that Paris,
sullen so long, the mutterings of which the kings who had sat there must
have heard with dread; that Paris which had finally risen in its wrath
and taken the pleasure-houses and the parks for itself.
Once they went out to Chantilly, the cameo-like chateau that stands
mirrored in its waters, and wandered through the alleys there. Honora
had left her parasol on the parapet, and as they returned Peter went to
get it, while she awaited him at a little distance. A group was chatting
gayly on the lawn, and one of them, a middle-aged, well-dressed man
hailed him with an air of fellowship, and Peter stopped for a moment's
talk.
“We were speaking of ambassadors the other day,” he said when he joined
her; “that was our own, Minturn.”
“We were speaking of them nearly a month ago,” she said.
“A month ago! I can't believe it!” he exclaimed.
“What did he say to you?” Honora inquired presently.
“He was abusing me for not letting him know I was in Paris.”
“Peter, you ought to have let him know!”
“I didn't come over here to see the ambassador,” answered Peter, gayly.
She talked less than usual on their drive homeward, but he did not
seem to notice the fact. Dusk was already lurking in the courtyards and
byways of the quiet quarter when the porter let them in, and the stone
stairway of the old hotel was almost in darkness. The sitting-room, with
its yellow, hangings snugly drawn and its pervading but soft light, was
a grateful change. And while she was gone to--remove her veil and hat,
Peter looked around it.
It was redolent of her. A high vase of remarkable beauty, filled with
white roses, stood on the gueridon. He went forward and touched it,
and closed his eyes as though in pain. When he opened them he saw her
standing in the archway.
She had taken off her coat, and was in a simple white muslin gown, with
a black belt--a costume that had become habitual. Her age was thirty.
The tragedy and the gravity of her life during these later years had
touched her with something that before was lacking. In the street,
in the galleries, people had turned to look at her; not with impudent
stares. She caught attention, aroused imagination. Once, the year
before, she had had a strange experience with a well-known painter, who,
in an impulsive note, had admitted following her home and bribing the
concierge. He craved a few sittings. Her expression now, as she looked
at Peter, was graver than usual.
“You must not come to-morrow,” she said.
“I thought we were going to Versailles again,” he replied in surprise.
“I have made the arrangements.”
“I have changed my mind. I'm not going.”
“You want to postpone it?” he asked.
She took a chair beside the little blaze in the fireplace.
“Sit down, Peter. I wish to say something to you. I have been wishing to
do so for some time.”
“Do you object if I stand a moment?” he said. “I feel so much more
comfortable standing, especially when I am going to be scolded.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “I am going to scold you. Your conscience has
warned you.”
“On the contrary,” he declared, “it has never been quieter. If I have
offended; it is through ignorance.”
“It is through charity, as usual,” she said in a low voice. “If
your conscience be quiet, mine is not. It is in myself that I am
disappointed--I have been very selfish. I have usurped you. I have
known it all along, and I have done very wrong in not relinquishing you
before.”
“Who would have shown me Paris?” he exclaimed.
“No,” she continued, “you would not have been alone. If I had needed
proof of that fact, I had it to-day--”
“Oh, Minturn,” he interrupted; “think of me hanging about an Embassy and
trying not to spill tea!” And he smiled at the image that presented.
Her own smile was fleeting.
“You would never do that, I know,” she said gravely.
“You are still too modest, Peter, but the time has gone by when I can
be easily deceived. You have a great reputation among men of affairs, an
unique one. In spite of the fact that you are distinctly American, you
have a wide interest in what is going on in the world. And you have an
opportunity here to meet people of note, people really worth while from
every point of view. You have no right to neglect it.”
He was silent a moment, looking down at her. She was leaning forward,
her eyes fixed on the fire, her hands clasped between her knees.
“Do you think I care for that?” he asked.
“You ought to care,” she said, without looking up. “And it is my duty to
try to make you care.”
“Honora, why do you think I came over here?” he said.
“To see Paris,” she answered. “I have your own word for it. To--to
continue your education. It never seems to stop.”
“Did you really believe that?”
“Of course I believed it. What could be more natural? And you have never
had a holiday like this.”
“No,” he agreed. “I admit that.”
“I don't know how much longer you are going to stay,” she said. “You
have not been abroad before, and there are other places you ought to
go.”
“I'll get you to make out an itinerary.”
“Peter, can't you see that I'm serious? I have decided to take matters
in my own hands. The rest of the time you are here, you may come to see
me twice a week. I shall instruct the concierge.”
He turned and grasped the mantel shelf with both hands, and touched the
log with the toe of his boot.
“What I told you about seeing Paris may be called polite fiction,” he
said. “I came over here to see you. I have been afraid to say it until
to-day, and I am afraid to say it now.”
She sat very still. The log flared up again, and he turned slowly and
looked at the shadows in her face.
“You-you have always been good to me,” she answered. “I have never
deserved it--I have never understood it. If it is any satisfaction for
you to know that what I have saved of myself I owe to you, I tell you so
freely.”
“That,” he said, “is something for which God forbid that I should take
credit. What you are is due to the development of a germ within you, a
development in which I have always had faith. I came here to see you, I
came here because I love you, because I have always loved you, Honora.”
“Oh, no, not that!” she cried; “not that!”
“Why not?” he asked. “It is something I cannot help, something beyond
my power to prevent if I would. But I would not. I am proud of it, and I
should be lost without it. I have had it always. I have come over to beg
you to marry me.”
“It's impossible! Can't you see it's impossible?”
“You don't love me?” he said. Into those few words was thrown all the
suffering of his silent years.
“I don't know what I feel for you,” she answered in an agonized voice,
her fingers tightening over the backs of her white hands. “If reverence
be love--if trust be love, infinite and absolute trust--if gratitude be
love--if emptiness after you are gone be a sign of it--yes, I love you.
If the power to see clearly only through you, to interpret myself only
by your aid be love, I acknowledge it. I tell you so freely, as of your
right to know. And the germ of which you spoke is you. You have grown
until you have taken possession of--of what is left of me. If I had
only been able to see clearly from the first, Peter, I should be another
woman to-day, a whole woman, a wise woman. Oh, I have thought of it
much. The secret of life was there at my side from the time I was able
to pronounce your name, and I couldn't see it. You had it. You stayed.
You took duty where you found it, and it has made you great. Oh, I don't
mean to speak in a worldly sense. When I say that, it is to express the
highest human quality of which I can think and feel. But I can't marry
you. You must see it.”
“I cannot see it,” he replied, when he had somewhat gained control of
himself.
“Because I should be wronging you.”
“How?” he asked.
“In the first place, I should be ruining your career.”
“If I had a career,” he said, smiling gently, “you couldn't ruin it. You
both overestimate and underestimate the world's opinion, Honora. As my
wife, it will not treat you cruelly. And as for my career, as you call
it, it has merely consisted in doing as best I could the work that has
come to me. I have tried to serve well those who have employed me, and
if my services be of value to them, and to those who may need me in
the future, they are not going to reject me. If I have any worth in the
world, you will but add to it. Without you I am incomplete.”
She looked up at him wonderingly.
“Yes, you are great,” she said. “You pity me, you think of my
loneliness.”
“It is true I cannot bear to picture you here,” he exclaimed. “The
thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to
take and shield you. I am not a man to marry a woman without love. It
seems to me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora.
There never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be.
I have given you proof of it, God knows.”
“I am not what I was,” she said, “I am not what I was. I have been
dragged down.”
He bent and lifted her hand from her knee, and raised it to his lips, a
homage from him that gave her an exquisite pain.
“If you had been dragged down,” he answered simply, “my love would have
been killed. I know something of the horrors you have been through, as
though I had suffered them myself. They might have dragged down another
woman, Honora. But they have strangely ennobled you.”
She drew her hand away.
“No,” she said, “I do not deserve happiness. It cannot be my destiny.”
“Destiny,” he repeated. “Destiny is a thing not understandable by finite
minds. It is not necessarily continued tragedy and waste, of that I am
certain. Only a little thought is required, it seems to me, to assure us
that we cannot be the judges of our own punishment on this earth. And of
another world we know nothing. It cannot be any one's destiny to throw
away a life while still something may be made of it. You would be
throwing your life away here. That no other woman is possible, or ever
can be possible, for me should be a consideration with you, Honora. What
I ask of you is a sacrifice--will you make me happy?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Peter, do you care so much as that? If--if I could be sure that I
were doing it for you! If in spite--of all that has happened to me, I
could be doing something for you--!”
He stooped and kissed her.
“You can if you will,” he said.
PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Best way is to leave 'em alone. Don't dandle 'em (babies)
Blessed are the ugly, for they shall not be tempted
Comparisons, as Shakespeare said, are odorous
Constitutionally honest
Conversation was a mockery
Every one, man or woman, has the right to happiness
Fact should be written like fiction, and fiction like fact
Fetters of love
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history's book
He has always been too honest to make a great deal of money
Her words of comfort were as few as her silent deeds were many
How can you talk of things other people have and not want them
Immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world
Intense longing is always followed by disappointment
Little better than a gambling place (Stock Exchange)
No reason why we should suffer all our lives for a mistake
Often in real danger at the moment when they feel most secure
Providence is accepted by his beneficiaries as a matter of fact
Regarding favourable impressions with profound suspicion
Resented the implication of possession
Rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing
Self-torture is human
She had never known the necessity of making friends
Sleep! A despised waste of time in childhood
So glad to have what other people haven't
Sought to remove comparisons
Taking him like daily bread, to be eaten and not thought about
That magic word Change
The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but near
The days of useless martyrdom are past
Thinking that because you have no ideals, other people haven't
Those who walk on ice will slide against their wills
Time, the unbribeable
Weak coffee and the Protestant religion seemed inseparable
Why should I desire what I cannot have
End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Complete, by Winston Churchill