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Quidquid Amor Jussit, Non Est Contemnere Tutum.
I must think of something to say, thought Verity. Why have I no small talk like those girls over there? If I could help him to talk, he would like me more; he’s shy like me, and I ought to make things easier, not harder. There’s farming but he would not be attracted by my pigs and poultry. Mining I’m no more interested in than he. The sea I know nothing of except cutters and seiners and other small fry. The shipwreck last month…but that might not be a tactful thing to discuss. Why can’t I just say, la, la, la, and giggle and be fanciful.
why can't *I* just say la, la, la?
“Him an’ me’s friends,” she said. “Well?” She did not speak for a time. “Garrick an’ me’s done everything together. I couldn’t leave ’im to starve.” “Well?” “I couldn’t, mister. I couldn’t—” In distress she began to slip off the mare. He suddenly found that the thing he had set out to prove had proved something quite different. Human nature had outmaneuvered him. For if she would not desert a friend, neither could he.
he was deeply annoyed at having to leave the fair before he was drunk, a thing that had never happened to him since he was ten.
All the conflicting feeling inside her suddenly found an outlet. The mixed motives for asking him in—the liking, the affection, the feminine curiosity, the piqued pride—suddenly merged into indignation to keep out something stronger. She was as much alarmed at her own feelings as indignant with him, but the situation had to be saved somehow.
shifting pov mid paras
“Aw! I’ll get ’ee rags and some turpletine.”
turpletine
good money until he was twenty-six, and then the phthisis
He felt righteous and unashamed. He decided to go to bed sober.
what the heck. I'll give it a try this once.
Tedn’t fair. Tedn’t just. Tedn’t British.
At the word fifteen they turned. Francis fired first and hit Blamey in the hand. Blamey dropped his pistol. He bent and picked it up with his left hand and fired back. Francis put up a hand to his neck and fell to the ground.
As would be the case all through her life, she had a store of nervous energy, unavailable at ordinary times but able to serve her in sudden need. It was a fundamental reserve that a stronger person might never know.
The attitude of the Bodrugans to his idea of letting a poacher off with a warning was, he knew, the attitude all society would adopt, though they might dress it in politer phrases. Even Cornish society, which looked with such tolerance on the smuggler. The smuggler was a clever fellow who knew how to cheat the government of its revenues and bring them brandy at half price. The poacher not only trespassed literally upon someone’s land, he trespassed metaphorically upon all the inalienable rights of personal property. He was an outlaw and a felon. Hanging was barely good enough.
“These savage laws,” Ross said, controlling his temper with the greatest difficulty. “These savage laws that you interpret without charity send a man to prison for feeding his children when they are hungry, for finding food where he can when it’s denied him to earn it. The book from which you take your teaching, Dr. Halse, says that man shall not live by bread alone. These days you’re asking men to live without even bread.”
She looked at him candidly, without coquetry and without fear. “I live only for you, Ross.” A breeze lifted the curtain at one of the open windows. The birds outside were quiet at last and it was dark. He kissed her again, that time on the mouth.
A big fly came down also and settled on a leaf close to her face; he had two round brown knobs on his head and at that range looked enormous, a prehistoric animal that had roamed the jungles of a forgotten world. First he stood on four front legs and rubbed the two back ones with sinuous ease up and down his wings, then he stood on the four back and rubbed the two front ones like an obsequious shopkeeper.
maybe the best paragraph about a fly that i have ever read.
were married on the twenty-fourth of June, 1787. The
giant annoying jump forward in time with spoiler redacted
Why must you plague me with these questions in the middle of the night?”
Tedn’t right. Tedn’t tidy. Tedn’t fair. Tedn’t clean. Tedn’t good enough.”
‘Thou shalt not move thy neighbor’s landmark.
The Trenwith Poldarks had never been sticklers for the agrémens,
historical fiction is defeating the dictionsry on my Kindle.
Dinner began at five and went on until seven forty. It was a meal worthy of the age, the house, and the season. Pea soup to begin, followed by a roast swan with sweet sauce, giblets, mutton steaks, a partridge pie, and four snipe. The second course was a plum pudding with brandy sauce, tarts, mince pies, custards, and cakes, all washed down with port wine and claret and Madeira and home-brewed ale. Ross felt that there was only one thing missing: Charles.
Another and less elevated lesson she had learned in married life was that if she wheedled long enough and discreetly enough, she quite often got her own way in the end.
