Цитаты из книги The Town in Bloom

I wanted to know more about the young... strange that though they laughed so loud , they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.

All right! The girl shall have her house — no matter how many lives she wrecks in getting it.

My aunt's broadmindedness had extended to women who lived with men who couldn't marry them ('George Eliot did'), to emancipated women who refused to marry the men they lived with ('One doesn't necessarily agree with them but they are making a stand about something'), even to prostitutes ('They are often driven to it'). But she was prejudiced against 'kept woman' - unless they were great courtesans or in history, when it didn't count - and she had handed on her prejudice to me.

Much of it might be nonsense but she had certainly stretched her mind in some interesting directions.

I'm a hopelessly susceptible man, also very fond of you. If you persist in this foolishness, no doubt I shall succumb and make love to you — only very limited love, I trust, but even that will be enough to spoil our friendship when I come to my senses, as I quickly shall.

He handed me a stick and said what a happy life I must have lived with my dear aunt, to be so blessedly un-shy. This had the effect of making me feel shy — I had never before considered the subject of shyness.