[T]here is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal. - Alice Meynell

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851 or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman though her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.

The cloud controls the light.[...] It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.