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It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness; hope sinks to misgiving; and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.
“My life is a burden without you,” he exclaimed in a low voice. “—I want you—I want you to let me say I love you again and again!”
An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit,* she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion.
He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.
There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s.
don’t see why a maid should take a husband when she’s bold enough to fight her own battles, and don’t want a home; for ’tis keeping another woman out. But let it be, for ’tis a pity he and she should trouble two houses.”
She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
“Don’t take on about her Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can’t be yours?” “That’s the very thing I say to myself,” said Gabriel.
“All romances end at marriage.”
This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be.
Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this dismantled grave, wished himself another man.
“He was hers, and she was his; they should be gone together,”
is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language, which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
