Aurora Floyd quotes

The same amount of beauty frittered away upon a well-shaped nose, rosy pouting lips, symmetrical forehead, and delicate complexion, would make an ordinarily lovely woman; but concentrated in one nucleus, in the wondrous lustre of the eyes, it makes a divinity, a Circe.

You may meet the first any day of your life; the second, once in a lifetime.

Mr. Floyd introduced his wife to the neighbouring gentry at a dinner-party which he gave soon after the lady’s arrival at Felden Woods, as his country seat was called;

Proud and sensitive, like almost all very honest and conscientious men, he could not endure that any creature should dare to befoul the name of the woman he loved so tenderly. What was the obscurity from which he had taken her to him?

Is a star less bright because it shines on a gutter as well as upon the purple bosom of the midnight sea?

Is a virtuous and generous-hearted woman less worthy because you find her making a scanty living out of the only industry she can exercise; and acting Juliet to an audience of factory-hands, who give threepence apiece for the privilege of admiring and applauding her?

She looked at him rather contemptuously.

“Cheops wasn’t much,” she said: “he won the Liverpool Autumn Cup in Blink Bonny’s year; but most people said it was a fluke.”

Talbot Bulstrode shuddered afresh; but a feeling of pity mingled with his horror. “If I had a sister,” he thought, “I would get her to talk to this miserable girl, and bring her to a sense of her iniquity.”

Though she said very little, and seated herself in a careless attitude that bespoke complete indifference to her visitors,

Aurora’s beauty extinguished poor Lucy, as the rising sun extinguishes the stars.

The thick plaits of her black hair made a great diadem upon her low forehead, and crowned her an Eastern empress; an empress with a doubtful nose, it is true, but an empress who reigned by right divine of her eyes and hair.

Delicacy of outline, perfection of feature, purity of tint, all were there; but while one face dazzled you by its shining splendour, the other impressed you only with a feeble sense of its charms, slow to come and quick to pass away.

There are so many Lucys but so few Auroras; and while you never could be critical with the one, you were merciless in your scrutiny of the other.

Talbot Bulstrode was attracted to Lucy by a vague notion that she was just the good and timid creature who was destined to make him happy;

Talbot Bulstrode followed Aurora on to the balcony; John Mellish went on with his story about the Beverley foxhounds; and Lucy, holding her breath at the other end of the room, knew as well what was going to happen as the captain himself.

Is not life altogether a long comedy, with Fate for the stage-manager, and Passion, Inclination, Love, Hate, Revenge, Ambition, and Avarice by turns in the prompter’s box?

A tiresome comedy sometimes, with dreary, talkee-talkee front scenes which come to nothing, but only serve to make the audience more impatient as they wait while the stage is set and the great people change their dresses;

and our friends in the pit are as much amused with our trumpery griefs as the Haymarket habitués when Mr. Box finds his gridiron empty, or Mr. Cox misses his rasher.

What can be funnier than other people’s anguish?

Why do we enjoy Mr. Maddison Morton’s farces, and laugh till the tears run down our cheek at the comedian who enacts them?

whereby she fell sick for love of Sir Lancelot, and pined and died.

Surely the secret of many sorrows lies in this. How many a grief has been bred of idleness and leisure!

How many a Spartan youth has nursed a bosom-devouring fox for very lack of better employment! Do the gentlemen who write the leaders in our daily journals ever die of grief?

the passion which might have made a dastard of the bravest of the three hundred at Thermopylae, or the six hundred at Balaklava.

He loved her, this unhappy young man, and he began to stammer, and hesitate, and apologize, shivering under the angry light in her wonderful eyes.

“Believe me, Aurora, that I would not for the world play the spy upon your actions, or dictate to you the objects of your bounty.

Floyd’s own man to a pleasant chamber, a few doors from the chintz-rooms occupied by Talbot! But I have said before, that love is a cowardly passion.

It is like the toothache; the bravest and strongest succumb to it, and howl aloud under the torture.

I don’t suppose the Iron Duke would have been ashamed to own that he objected to having his teeth out.

He passed the afternoon in this wretched manner, unobserved by anyone but Lucy, who watched him furtively from her distant seat, as he roamed in and out of the drawing-room.

Ah, how many a man is watched by loving eyes whose light he never sees! How many a man is cared for by a tender heart whose secret he never learns!

A little after dusk, Talbot Bulstrode went to his room to dress. It was some time before the bell would ring; but he would dress early, he thought, so as to make sure of being in the drawing-room when Aurora came down.

and he almost hated her for looking so bright and radiant, remembering, as he did, the ghastly face of the stricken creature he had just left.

We are apt to be horribly unjust in the hour of supreme trouble

; and I fear that if anyone had had the temerity to ask Talbot Bulstrode’s opinion of Lucy Floyd just at that moment, the captain would have declared her to be a mass of frivolity and affectation.

to those, at least, who have never suffered from this fever. The sharper the disease, the shorter its continuance; so Talbot will be better by-and-by, and will look back at his old self, and laugh at his old agonies.

Surely this inconstancy of ours is the worst of all⁠—this fickleness, by reason of which we cast off our former selves with no more compunction than we feel in flinging away a worn-out garment.

Our poor threadbare selves, the shadows of what we were! With what sublime, patronizing pity, with what scornful compassion, we look back upon the helpless dead and gone creatures, and wonder that anything so foolish could have been allowed to cumber the earth!

Surely this inconstancy of ours is the worst of all—this fickleness, by reason of which we cast off our former selves with no more compunction than we feel in flinging away a worn-out garment.

Our poor threadbare selves, the shadows of what we were!

With what sublime, patronizing pity, with what scornful compassion, we look back upon the helpless dead and gone creatures, and wonder that anything so foolish could have been allowed to cumber the earth!

If I were like that dear considerate little Lucy, now—” And with a shrug of her shoulders, and an unfinished sentence such as this, Mrs. Mellish dismissed the insignificant subject from her mind.

You cannot expect these grand, courageous creatures to be frightened of quiet people. And yet, in the great dramas of life, it is the quiet people who do the mischief.

Iago was not a noisy person; though, thank Heaven! it is no longer the fashion to represent him as an oily sneak, whom even the most foolish of Moors could not have trusted.

but the next moment she was ashamed of her childish folly, and a few hours afterwards had forgotten Steeve Hargraves, the “Softy,” as he was politely called in the stables.

Reader, when any creature inspires you with this instinctive unreasoning abhorrence, avoid that creature. He is dangerous.

Take warning, as you take warning by the clouds in the sky, and the ominous stillness of the atmosphere when there is a storm coming. Nature cannot lie; and it is nature which has planted that shuddering terror in your breast;

Reader, when any creature inspires you with this instinctive unreasoning abhorrence, avoid that creature. He is dangerous. Take warning, as you take warning by the clouds in the sky, and the ominous stillness of the atmosphere when there is a storm coming.

Nature cannot lie; and it is nature which has planted that shuddering terror in your breast

; an instinct of self-preservation rather than of cowardly fear, which at the first sight of some fellow-creature tells you more plainly than words can speak, “That man is my enemy!”

John Mellish had as high and stern a sense of honour as Talbot Bulstrode; but while the proud Cornishman’s strength of brain lay in the reflective faculties, the Yorkshireman’s acute intellect was strongest in its power of perception.

Talbot drove himself half mad with imagining what might be; John saw what was

; and he saw, or fancied he saw, that the woman he loved was worthy of all love; and he gave his peace and honour freely into her keeping.

and they carry the rosy garlands until their dying hour with a sublime unconsciousness that those floral chains are not very easy to be broken. Your little man is self-assertive, and forever on his guard against womanly domination.

All tyrannical husbands on record have been little men, from Mr. Daniel Quilp upwards

; but who could ever convince a fellow of six foot two in his stockings that he was afraid of his wife? He submits to the pretty tyrant with a quiet smile of resignation. What does it matter? She is so little, so fragile;

And today she met him with her thoughts so full of the horse which had just been beaten, that she scarcely knew what she said to her sometime lover.

Aurora Floyd was dead and buried, and Aurora Mellish, looking critically at Talbot Bulstrode, wondered how anyone could have ever gone near to the gates of death for the love of him.

It was Talbot who grew pale at this unlooked-for encounter; it was Talbot whose voice was shaken in the utterance of those few everyday syllables which common courtesy demanded of him. The captain had not so easily learned to forget.

… gather in groups, and explain to each other, with stable jargon intermingled with oaths, how the victory just over ought not to have been, and never could have been, but for some un-looked-for and preposterous combination of events never before witnessed upon any mortal course.

How little is ever seen of the losers in any of the great races run upon this earth!

For years and years the name of Louis Napoleon is an empty sound, signifying nothing;

He was unjust enough to nourish a secret dislike to that young lady for the good service she had done him by revealing Aurora’s flight.

Are we ever really grateful to the people who tell us of the iniquity of those we love?

Are we ever really just to the kindly creatures who give us friendly warning of our danger? No, never! We hate them; always involuntarily reverting to them as the first causes of our anguish;

The letter dropped out of John Mellish’s hand as he looked up at his wife.

It was not a scream which she had uttered. It was a gasping cry, more terrible to hear than the shrillest scream that ever came from the throat of woman in all the long history of womanly distress.

He looked at her, and his own face changed and whitened at the sight of hers.

Is it because, being cut off in a great measure by the nature of their employment from family ties and family pleasures, they feel a malicious delight in all family trials and vexations, and the ever-recurring breezes which disturb the domestic atmosphere?

Remember this, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, when you quarrel. Your servants enjoy the fun.

Surely that recollection ought to be enough to keep you forever peaceful and friendly.

Remember this, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, when you quarrel. Your servants enjoy the fun. Surely that recollection ought to be enough to keep you forever peaceful and friendly.

Your servants listen at your doors, and repeat your spiteful speeches in the kitchen, and watch you while they wait at table, and understand every sarcasm, every innuendo, every look, as well as those at whom the cruel glances and the stinging words are aimed.

They understand your sulky silence, your studied and overacted politeness.

for, in spite of all experience, we revolt against it, and are incredulous to the last, believing that the palace which is outwardly so splendid can scarcely be ill furnished within.

Heaven help the woman who sells her heart for a handsome face, and awakes when the bargain has been struck, to discover the foolishness of such an exchange!

It took Mr. Conyers a long while to walk from the lodge to the house. I do not know how, technically, to describe his lameness.

He had found the sentimentality of his beauty almost of greater use to him than the beauty itself. It was this sentimentality which always put him at an advantage with his employers.

He looked like an exiled prince doing menial service in bitterness of spirit and a turned-down collar.

He looked like Lara returned to his own domains to train the horses of a usurper.

Pastern’s letter. Whatever dark cloud had hovered over her head, since the day upon which that simple epistle had caused such a terrible effect, seemed to have been suddenly removed. Mrs. Walter Powell was not slow to perceive this change.

The eyes of love, clear-sighted though they may be, are dull indeed beside the eyes of hate.

Those are never deceived. Aurora had wandered out of the drawing-room, listless and dispirited, to stroll wearily upon the lawn;—Mrs.

Talbot Bulstrode was very calm, very quiet, but apparently sufficiently happy. I use that word “sufficiently” advisedly.

It is a dangerous thing to be too happy.

Your high-pressure happiness, your sixty-miles-an-hour enjoyment, is apt to burst up and come to a bad end.

“He is the most glorious of princes, the most perfect of saints, is he not? and you worship him all day; you sing silent hymns in his praise, and perform high mass in his honour, and go about telling his virtues upon an imaginary rosary.

Ah, Lucy, how many kinds of love there are! and who shall say which is the best or highest?

I see plain, blundering John Mellish yonder, with unprejudiced eyes; I know his every fault, I laugh at his every awkwardness. Yes, I laugh now, for he is dropping those things faster than the servants can pick them up.”

The poor papa looked wonderingly from his daughter to his daughter’s husband. What did it all mean? Trouble, vexation, weariness of spirit, humiliation, disgrace?

Ah, Heaven help that enfeebled mind whose strength has been shattered by one great shock!

Archibald Floyd dreaded the token of a coming storm in every chance cloud on the summer’s sky.

He shook hands with Mr. Floyd, parting from him with that half-affectionate, half-reverent manner which he always displayed to Aurora’s father. Mrs. Mellish stood for some moments silent and motionless, looking after her husband; while her father, watching her looks, tried to read their meaning.

How quiet are the tragedies of real life!

That dreadful scene between the Moor and his Ancient takes place in the open street of Cyprus, according to modern usage. I can scarcely fancy Othello and Iago debating about poor Desdemona’s honesty in St.

… detection was to dog the footsteps of crime, and the gallows to follow at the heels of detection, he would most likely have hesitated long before he mixed the strychnine-pills for the friend whom, with cordial voice, he was entreating to be of good cheer.

We spend the best part of our lives in making mistakes, and the poor remainder in reflecting how very easily we might have avoided them.

Mr. Floyd explained, rather lamely, perhaps, how it was that the Liverpool spinster had never been informed of her grandniece’s marriage with Mr. John Mellish; and the merchant-captain announced his intention of starting for Doncaster early the next morning.

Is it quite right to be angry with the world because it worships success? for is not success, in some manner, the stamp of divinity?

Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find that it was emptiness that made the music.

Mr. Conyers contented himself with declaring that he walked on a road which was unworthy of his footsteps;

Whatever Mrs. Mellish does, she does with my full consent, my perfect approbation.

Caesar’s wife must not be suspected, and by Jove, ma’am!⁠—you’ll pardon the expression⁠—John Mellish’s wife must not be watched.

”

If she was a little less interested upon this occasion than usual, Mr. Lofthouse did not observe her inattention, for in the simple earnestness of his own mind, he thought it scarcely possible that the schoolhouse topic could fail to be interesting.

Nothing is so difficult as to make people understand that you don’t care for what they themselves especially affect.

John Mellish could not believe that the entries for the Great Ebor were not interesting to Mr.

Impulsive, nervous, sensitive, sanguine; with such a one passion is a madness—brief, thank Heaven! and expending itself in sharply cruel words, and convulsive rendings of lace and ribbon, or coroner’s juries might have to sit even oftener than they do.

It is fortunate for mankind that speaking daggers is often quite as great a satisfaction to us as using them, and that we can threaten very cruel things without meaning to carry them out.

Like the little children who say, “Won’t I just tell your mother!” and the terrible editors who write, “Won’t I give you a castigation in the Market-Deeping Spirit of the Times, or the Walton-on-the-Naze Athenaeum!”

that C and his pretty wife are the happiest couple we know; and tomorrow B is in the Gazette, and C is weeping over a dishonoured home, and a group of motherless children, who wonder what mamma has done that papa should be so sorry.

The battles are very quiet, but they are forever being fought.

We keep the fox hidden under our cloak, but the teeth of the animal are none the less sharp, nor the pain less terrible to bear; a little more terrible, perhaps, for being endured silently.

and tomorrow B is in the Gazette, and C is weeping over a dishonoured home, and a group of motherless children, who wonder what mamma has done that papa should be so sorry. The battles are very quiet, but they are forever being fought.

We keep the fox hidden under our cloak, but the teeth of the animal are none the less sharp, nor the pain less terrible to bear; a little more terrible, perhaps, for being endured silently.

John Mellish gave a long sigh of relief when the Indian officer finished his third cheroot, and pronounced himself ready to join the ladies. The lamps in the drawing-room were lighted, and the curtains drawn before the open windows, when the three gentlemen entered. Mrs.

In the summer evening stillness James Conyers was carried back to the chamber from whose narrow window he had looked out upon the beautiful world, weary of its beauty, only a few hours before.

The purposeless life was suddenly closed. The careless wanderer’s journey had come to an unthought-of end.

What a melancholy record, what a meaningless and unfinished page! Nature, blindly bountiful to the children whom she has yet to know, had bestowed her richest gifts upon this man.

The phrenologists who examined the head of William Palmer declared that he was so utterly deficient in moral perception, so entirely devoid of conscientious restraint, that he could not help being what he was.

Heaven keep us from too much credence in that horrible fatalism!

Is a man’s destiny here and hereafter to depend upon bulbous projections scarcely perceptible to uneducated fingers, and good and evil propensities which can be measured by the compass or weighed in the scale?

He could not tolerate such an idea as this; and he sacrificed poor Archibald Floyd’s commercial integrity for the preservation of Aurora’s womanly dignity.

Ah, how weak and imperfect a passion is this boundless love!

How ready to sacrifice others for that one loved object, which must be kept spotless in our imaginations, though a hecatomb of her fellow-creatures are to be blackened and befouled for her justification!

I can recall every object in that simple scene—the atmosphere of the sunless day, the sounds in the soft summer air, the voices of the people near me; I can recall everything except—myself.

This miserable ego is the one thing that I cannot bring back; the one thing that seems strange to me; the one thing that I can scarcely believe in.

If I went back to that northern common-land tomorrow, I should recognize every hillock, every scrap of furze, or patch of heather.

She sat alone, I have said; but Heaven knows she was not companionless. Black care and corroding anxiety kept her faithful company, and would not budge from her side.

What companions are so adhesive as trouble and sorrow?

what associates so tenacious, what friends so watchful and untiring?

Let it work which way it will, they’re in my power—they’re both in my power; and I’m no longer a poor dependent, to be sent away, at a quarter’s notice, when it pleases them to be tired of me.”

The bread of dependence is not a pleasant diet; but there are many ways of eating the same food.

Mrs. Powell’s habit was to receive all favours grudgingly, as she would have given, had it been her lot to give instead of to receive.

She had eaten the bitter bread upon which she had lived so long in a bitter spirit; and her whole nature had turned to gall from the influence of that disagreeable diet.

A moderately-generous person can bestow a favour, and bestow it well; but to receive a boon with perfect grace requires a far nobler and more generous nature.

John Mellish approached the open window at which the ensign’s widow was seated, and looked into the room. Aurora was not there. The long saloon seemed empty and desolate. The decorations of the temple looked cold and dreary, for the deity was absent.

That’s your mistake, Mrs. Powell;

I’m not clever enough to be a fool, and I’ve just sufficient perception to see any danger that assails those I love.

You don’t like my wife; you grudge her her youth and her beauty, and my foolish love for her; and you’ve watched, and listened, and plotted—in a ladylike way, of course—to do her some evil. Forgive me if I speak plainly.

you grudge her her youth and her beauty, and my foolish love for her; and you’ve watched, and listened, and plotted—in a ladylike way, of course—to do her some evil. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Where Aurora is concerned, I feel very strongly.

To hurt her little finger is to torture my whole body. To stab her once is to stab me a hundred times.

I have no wish to be discourteous to a lady; I am only sorry that you have been unable to love a poor girl who has rarely failed to win friends amongst those who have known her.

No; every pang that Aurora had felt, every agony that John had endured, had left a certain impress upon the scene in which it had been suffered.

The subtle influences of association hung heavily about the familiar place.

We are the slaves of such associations, and we are powerless to stand against their silent force.

… to that lonely room in which you hid yourself—all these bear record of your sorrow, and of that hideous double action of the mind which impresses these things most vividly upon you at the very time when it would seem they should be most indifferent.

But every sorrow, every pang of wounded love, or doubt, or jealousy, or despair, is a fact⁠—a fact once, and a fact forever; to be outlived, but very rarely to be forgotten; leaving such an impress upon our lives as no future joys can quite wear out.

The murder has been done, and the hands are red. The sorrow has been suffered; and however beautiful Happiness may be to us, she can never be the bright virginal creature she once was;

to be outlived, but very rarely to be forgotten; leaving such an impress upon our lives as no future joys can quite wear out.

The murder has been done, and the hands are red.

The sorrow has been suffered; and however beautiful Happiness may be to us, she can never be the bright virginal creature she once was; for she has passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and we have discovered that she is not immortal.

Her own hands had sown the dragon’s teeth, from whose evil seed had sprung up armed men, strong enough to rend and devour her. But then, if she had been faultless, she could not have been the heroine of this story; for

I think some wise man of old remarked, that the perfect women were those who left no histories behind them, but went through life upon such a tranquil course of quiet well-doing as left no footprints on the sands of time

; only mute records hidden here and there, deep in the grateful hearts of those who had been blest by them.

I wonder how much of the Thunderer’s noble Saxon English Mr. Bulstrode comprehended that morning! The broad white paper on which the Times is printed serves as a convenient screen for a man’s face.

Heaven knows what agonies have been sometimes endured behind that printed mask!

A woman, married, and a happy mother, glances carelessly enough at the Births and Marriages and Deaths, and reads perhaps that the man she loved, and parted with, and broke her heart for, fifteen or twenty years before, has fallen, shot through the heart, far …

Powell. She has disappeared forever from my story, and I have no wish to blacken a character which can ill afford to be slandered. The ensign’s widow actually believed in the guilt of her beautiful patroness.

It is so easy for an envious woman to believe horrible things of the more prosperous sister whom she hates.

If the “Softy” showed any disposition to be social, and gave his companion any opportunity of getting friendly with him, the detective’s underling was to employ his utmost skill and discretion in availing himself of that golden chance.

It is a wondrous provision of Providence that the treachery which would be hateful and horrible in any other man, is considered perfectly legitimate in the man who is employed to hunt out a murderer or a thief.

The vile instruments which the criminal employed against his unsuspecting victim are in due time used against himself;

he sat sullen, silent, stupid, unapproachable; and as Tom’s orders were not to force himself upon his companion, he was fain to abandon all thought of worming himself into the “Softy’s” good graces. This made the task of watching him all the more difficult.

It is not such a very easy matter to follow a man without seeming to follow him.

It was market-day too, and the town was crowded with noisy country people. Mr. Grimstone suddenly remembered this, and the recollection by no means added to his peace of mind.