Don’t underestimate the value of irony — it is extremely valuable. - Henry James

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.

She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.