A Bride of a Summer’s Day quotes

The guests assembled under the porch, with their rice and old satin shoes, exchanged glances.

It was like the sound of a funeral-bell in the midst of a feast.

“My dear love!” cried Lady Culvers, rustling forward in her silks and velvets, “let someone else do that for you!”

Lord Culvers’s benignant smile vanished.

Nature had sent him into the world with a disposition as peaceful and placid as a still lake amid mountains, and Fate had linked his lot with temperaments as restless and turbulent as the ocean itself.

Was life for him to be forever whirlpool and worry?

The incident alluded to had exhibited Lord Culvers in a most characteristic light. Two or three frightened servants had rushed into his room in the dead of night, exclaiming, “A fire, my lord, in the mews at the back of the house; pray get up.”

“A fire,” Lord Culvers had repeated, calmly, without opening his eyes; “well, I dare say it will go out again,”

and he had turned over on his other side to finish his night’s rest.

“The only objection,” he said, slowly, after awhile, “that I can see to my version of the affair, is that it is too simple a reading of the mystery.

In real life, as a rule, the solutions to mysteries are nearly as mysterious as the thing itself.

Human motives and feelings are so complex, that when they are revealed to us, it is often difficult to believe that they stand to action in the relation of cause to effect.

“Tried to.

But you might as well try to cross-question the wind or the waves as Juliet when she has a mind to be silent.

With all her gaiety and capriciousness, she can keep a secret if she is so disposed. I know perfectly well if Ida had tied her down with any promises, there’s no power on earth would make her break them.

Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at her. Then, with polite circumlocution, told her to mind her own business.

“Embroidery, Peggy,” she said, “requires an undivided attention. Otherwise you will be turning your daisies into dandelions.”

Then, before “Peggy” could recover herself, or her father find words in which to mark his sense of her employment of the objectionable nickname, the girl had taken her hat from a side table and had wandered out into the garden, through one of the …

And Juliet’s reply was also characteristic:

“Quarrel with Peggy⁠—at such a time!” she exclaimed. “I should as soon think of quarrelling with the flies on the ceiling!”

So soon as her father was out of sight, without even calling her stepmother into council, she despatched a telegram to Clive, telling him of the finding of the brooch, and asking him to meet her father in Paris on the following day.

Fancy setting an egg on end, and bidding it run about and crow like a chicken. When the poor egg rolled over and fell helplessly to the ground, one would feel bound to admit that a little too much had been required of it.

All Lord Culvers had ever asked of Providence was a quiet life in which to enjoy the good things bestowed upon him. And a quiet life was just the one thing that Providence persisted in denying to him.

But, whether able to comply with them or not, demands upon Lord Culvers’s energies were from this point to follow thick and fast.

He thought he would take a turn in the Champs Élysées and see if the fresh air would clear his brain and put some fresh ideas into it.

Ideas, however, are among the many things for which the demand does not create the supply.

Clive wandered along the sultry, dusty road in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, his brain meantime, instead of grinding out fresh ideas, working incessantly at the old treadmill of anxieties, perplexities, and distresses which for him from the very first had gathered round …

And as she knelt thus in that dread presence, with senses sealed to all outward things, a rush of thoughts came to her.

How vain seemed life with its passions and longings!

This girl was but one of thousands who, as it were, beat out their souls with their hopes and dreads. Had not she herself been doing the same thing, though in another fashion? Were not her feet bent on running much the same course?

or some yawning chasm showing black now in the fading daylight.

And everywhere silence, solitude⁠—intense, profound. It seemed a place for shades and ghosts to wander in, rather than men endowed with senses that loved light and colour, glow and variety in beauty.

“They’re taking us all right, I suppose; this path seems endless,” said Clive, addressing Sefton in English.