Can You Forgive Her?

by Anthony Trollope

Young ladies living with their fathers on very moderate incomes in or about Queen Anne Street are not usually much troubled on that matter.

intimacy which gave her a footing in their houses but no footing in their hearts,

She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious,

but she was angered by the application of that odious word respectable to her own prospects; and perhaps the more angered as she was somewhat inclined to feel that the epithet did suit her own position.

But she was sometimes almost angry with herself that she had permitted her heart to be thus easily taken from her, and had rebuked herself for her girlish facility.

the general homage paid to beauty,

I was obliged to seem to care, even if I didn't care."

He had lived in open defiance of decency.

In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.

that feeling of melancholy was coming on them which always pervades the last hours of any period that has been pleasant,—then

a pleasant way of swimming into the next world."

He was himself by no means a poor man, and he despised poverty in others.

He knew that he had done this under the influence of the champagne, and was aware that it might not be easy to procure again a combination of circumstances that would be so beneficial to him.

Alice had never written much of love in her love-letters,

It will be to me as though I were passing through a grave to a new world.

She was a hospitable, good old woman, painfully struggling to do the best she could in the world.

she saw at once that if any bitterness had passed away from that face, the original bitterness must indeed have been bitter.

ever

loved too with that momentary love which certain circumstances of our life will sometimes produce,

She looked at him and saw nothing but his scar,—nothing but his scar and the brightness of his eyes, which was almost fierce.

think that she might have learned to forget her early lover, or to look back upon it with a soft melancholy hardly amounting to regret,

magniloquence

and then they would sit till the small hours came upon them.

You have said that you would be my friend, and you must bear the burden of my friendship.

Her father had for many years relieved himself from the burden of a father's cares, and now had hardly the right to claim a father's privileges.

But the hairs will grow grey, and the heart will grow cold."

Paradise had been opened to her, she had declared herself to be fit only for Pandemonium.

will now ask the reader to go down with me to Nethercoats that we may be present with John Grey when he received it.

There are things which happen in a day which it would take a lifetime to explain."

mixes vile alloy with the gold.