The Custom of the Country

She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

The habit of solitude had given him a passion for the printed page, and if he could have found a book anywhere--any kind of a book--he would have forgotten the long hours and the empty house."

Her husband stood looking at her coldly and curiously, as though she were some alien apparition his eyes had never before beheld.

"He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediæval armour

His face was still the face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them.

All his life, and at ever-diminishing intervals, Mr. Spragg had been called on by his womenkind to "see what he could do"; and the seeing had almost always resulted as they wished.

All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene.

If any one had told her, a year earlier, that one of the chief distractions of her new life would be to invent ways of annoying her mother-in- law, she would have laughed at the idea of wasting her time on such trifles

The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange

Mrs. Spragg, when she found herself embarked on a long sentence, always ballasted it by italicizing the last word.