A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost. - Henry James

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.

It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her but they had been quietly excited... To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would have even been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of mighty human past was upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with fresh cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there.

"If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."