He only stopped once, to pick her some great blue violets. She thanked him with real pleasure. In the company of this common man the world was beauti… - E. M. Forster

Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.”
Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.