The Law and the Lady quotes

I came back to realities fortified and composed, rewarded for all that I had gone through, ready to go through it all over again for another kiss.

Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.

“Have they been raising fresh objections to our marriage?” he asked, as we slowly walked on again.

She now rose slowly and faced her son in silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt that I ever saw in a woman’s eyes.

“I pity your wife,” she said.

With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.

The last autumn flowers in the window basked brightly in the last of the autumn sunlight. Benjamin’s little dog digested his dinner in perfect comfort on the hearth. The parrot in the next house screeched his vocal accomplishments cheerfully.

I don’t doubt that it is a great privilege to be a human being. But may it not be the happier destiny to be an animal or a plant?

The brief respite was soon over; all my anxieties came back. I was once more a doubting, discontented, depressed creature when I rose to say goodbye.

He started back at the sound of his own name as if I had struck him—he started back, and turned so deadly pale that I feared he was going to drop at my feet in a swoon.

Oh, my tongue! my tongue! Why had I not controlled my miserable, mischievous woman’s tongue!

“I didn’t mean to alarm you, Eustace,” I said. “I spoke at random. Pray forgive me.”

There was no need for the old gentleman to make his little confession.

Women, children, and dogs proverbially know by instinct who the people are who really like them.

The women had a warm friend—perhaps at one time a dangerously warm friend—in Major Fitz-David. I knew as much of him as that before I had settled myself in my chair and opened my lips to answer him.

he married our niece under a false name. He may say he is innocent; but we have only his word for it. When he was put on his trial, the verdict was Not Proven.

Not Proven won’t do for us.

If the jury have done him an injustice—if he is innocent—let him prove it.’ That is what the world thinks and says of me. That is what your friends will think and say of me.

Never had a magnificent head and body been more hopelessly ill-bestowed than in this instance!

Never had Nature committed a more careless or a more cruel mistake than in the making of this man!

He was sworn, seated, of course, in his chair. Having given his name, he bowed to the judges and requested their permission to preface his evidence with a word of explanation.

“I may inform the good people here that many names, still common among us, have their significations, and that mine is one of them. ‘Alexander,’ for instance, means, in the Greek, ‘a helper of men.’ ‘David’ means, in Hebrew, ‘well-beloved.’ ‘Francis’ means, in German, ‘free.’

My name, ‘Miserrimus,’ means, in Latin, ‘most unhappy.’

It was given to me by my father, in allusion to the deformity which you all see—the deformity with which it was my misfortune to be born. You won’t laugh at ‘Miserrimus’ again, will you?”

From first to last, poor creature, she kept her secret; just as she would have kept her secret if she had worn false hair, or if she had been indebted to the dentist for her teeth.

And there you see her husband, in peril of his life, because a woman acted like a woman⁠—as your wives, gentlemen of the jury, would, in a similar position, act toward you.

”

“You must have evidence satisfactory and convincing to your own minds,” he said, “in which you find no conjectures—but only irresistible and just inferences.”

Who is to decide what is a just inference? And what is circumstantial evidence but conjecture?

After this specimen, I need give no further extracts from the summing up. The jury, thoroughly bewildered no doubt, took refuge in a compromise. They occupied an hour in considering and debating among themselves in their own room.

After this specimen, I need give no further extracts from the summing up. The jury, thoroughly bewildered no doubt, took refuge in a compromise. They occupied an hour in considering and debating among themselves in their own room.

(A jury of women would not have taken a minute!)

Then they returned into court, and gave their timid and trimming Scotch Verdict in these words:

Shall I confess that I took particular pains with my toilet, and that I kept the luncheon waiting?

The woman doesn’t live who would have done otherwise⁠—when she had a particular favor to ask of Major Fitz-David.

“Doesn’t daunt you? My dear lady, the man’s mind is as deformed as his body. What Voltaire said satirically of the character of his countrymen in general is literally true of Miserrimus Dexter.

He is a mixture of the tiger and the monkey. At one moment he would frighten you, and at the next he would set you screaming with laughter.

I don’t deny that he is clever in some respects—brilliantly clever, I admit. And I don’t say that he has ever committed any acts of violence, or ever willingly injured anybody. But, for all that, he is mad, if ever a man were mad yet.

“Of course not!” retorted the old lady. “

You are like all good women⁠—you make a hero of the man you love⁠—whether he deserve it or not.

Your husband has hosts of good qualities, child—and perhaps I know them better than you do.

A high chair on wheels moved by, through the field of red light, carrying a shadowy figure with floating hair, and arms furiously raised and lowered working the machinery that propelled the chair at its utmost rate of speed. “

I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz!

” shouted the man in the chair as he swept past me on his rumbling and whistling wheels, in the red glow of the firelight.

I am a very tenderhearted man. As the necessary consequence (in such a world as this), I am a miserable wretch. Accept my excuses. Come in, both of you. Come in and pity me.”

A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have gone in and pitied him.

The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching figure of Miserrimus Dexter at the expiring fire—and that was all.

“I have heard you both,” I said. “You need have no fear, Mr. Dexter, of speaking before me. I know that my husband had a first wife, and I know how miserably she died. I have read the trial.”

“You have read the life and death of a martyr!” cried Miserrimus Dexter.

He suddenly wheeled his chair my way; he bent over me; his eyes filled with tears. “Nobody appreciated her at her true value,” he said, “but me. Nobody but me! nobody but me!”

The lamp having been lighted, and fixed in its place between the two front windows of the carriage, Mrs. Macallan produced her son’s letter.

There is no folly like the folly of love.

It cost me a hard struggle to restrain myself from kissing the paper on which the dear hand had rested.

“Why should you upset me?” I inquired.

“Because I hate you,” was the cool and candid reply.

“What have I done to offend you?” I asked next.

“Wait till you hear the Master’s whistle,” she said; “then go upstairs.”

So! I was to be whistled for like a dog!

And, worse still, there was no help for it but to submit like a dog. Had Ariel any excuses to make? Nothing of the sort.

I sigh and sorrow over myself; I languish for pity. Just think of what I am! A poor solitary creature, cursed with a frightful deformity. How pitiable! how dreadful! My affectionate heart—wasted. My extraordinary talents—useless or misapplied. Sad! sad! sad! Please pity me.”

His eyes were positively filled with tears⁠—tears of compassion for himself!

He looked at me and spoke to me with the wailing, querulous entreaty of a sick child wanting to be nursed. I was utterly at a loss what to do. It was perfectly ridiculous—but I was never more embarrassed in my life.

The plaster casts ranged on the shelf opposite were casts (after death) of the heads of famous murderers. A frightful little skeleton of a woman hung in a cupboard, behind a glazed door, with this cynical inscription placed above the skull: “

Behold the scaffolding on which beauty is built!

” In a corresponding cupboard, with the door wide open, there hung in loose folds a shirt (as I took it to be) of chamois leather.

Touching it (and finding it to be far softer than any chamois leather that my fingers had ever felt before), I disarranged the folds, and disclosed a ticket pinned among them, describing the thing in these horrid lines: “

Skin of a French Marquis, tanned in the Revolution of Ninety-three. Who says the nobility are not good for something? They make good leather.

”

Besides, there were other difficulties in my way. I am not generally in the habit of needlessly betraying myself—I am a cautious man, though you may not have noticed it. But my immeasurable hatred of Mrs. Beauly was not to be concealed.

If eyes can tell secrets, she must have discovered, in my eyes, that I hungered and thirsted to see her in the hangman’s hands.

From first to last, I tell you, Mrs. Borgia-Beauly was on her guard against me. Can I describe her cunning? All my resources of language are not equal to the task. Take the degrees of comparison to give you a faint idea of it:

From first to last, I tell you, Mrs. Borgia-Beauly was on her guard against me. Can I describe her cunning? All my resources of language are not equal to the task. Take the degrees of comparison to give you a faint idea of it:

I am positively cunning; the devil is comparatively cunning; Mrs. Beauly is superlatively cunning.

No! no! If she is ever discovered, at this distance of time, it will not be done by a man—it will be done by a woman: a woman whom she doesn’t suspect;

On that understanding we parted. He sighed—the cheerful man sighed, as he opened the door for me.

Women are contradictory creatures. That sigh affected me more than all his arguments.

I felt myself blush for my own headstrong resistance to him as I took my leave and turned away into the street.

She went away when I stood in the sorest need of a little talk with her—she went away, and left me to my loneliness and my suspense. I am a poor deformed wretch, with a warm heart, and, perhaps, an insatiable curiosity as well.

Insatiable curiosity (have you ever felt it?) is a curse.

I bore it until my brains began to boil in my head; and then I sent for my gardener, and made him drive me here. I like being here. The air of your library soothes me; the sight of Mrs.

in the rough gardener who had carried him out so gently on the previous night? Who can decide?

The greatest scoundrel living always has a friend⁠—in a woman or a dog.

I sat down again at my desk, and made another attempt to write to Mr. Playmore.

If I had been traveling homeward in my own carriage, the remaining chapters of this narrative would never have been written. Before we had been an hour on the road I should have called to the driver, and should have told him to turn back.

Who can be always resolute?

In asking that question, I speak of the women, not of the men. I had been resolute in turning a deaf ear to Mr. Playmore’s doubts and cautions; resolute in holding out against my mother-in-law; resolute in taking my place by the French mail.

And then I was sorry for it. Poor humanity!

Time has got all the credit of being the great consoler of afflicted mortals. In my opinion, Time has been overrated in this matter. Distance does the same beneficent work far more speedily, and (when assisted by Change) far more effectually as well.

On the railroad to Paris, I became capable of taking a sensible view of my position. I could now remind myself that my husband’s reception of me—after the first surprise and the first happiness had passed away—might not have justified his mother’s confidence in him.

A woman who respects herself, and whose whole heart is with her husband, is not so very seriously injured when a wretched crippled creature is rude enough to put his arm around her waist.

Virtuous indignation (if I may venture to say so) is sometimes very cheap indignation.

Besides, I have forgiven him—and you must forgive him too. There is no fear of his forgetting himself again, while you are with me. His house is quite a curiosity—it is sure to interest you; the pictures alone are worth the journey.

He laid my check on the table with a low bow, and left me.

Among the curious developments of human stupidity which occasionally present themselves to view, surely the least excusable is the stupidity which, to this day, persists in wondering why the Scotch succeed so well in life!

I laid my head on his bosom, and whispered back—“I mean your child.”

I had all my reward for all that I had given up.

I forgot Mr. Playmore; I forgot Gleninch. Our new honeymoon dates, in my remembrance, from that day.

His answer (as he afterward said) made me blush with pleasure. “

Ah, Valeria, I should never have gone away if I had known you then as well as I know you now!

”

But one last victory over myself was wanting to make my happiness complete. I still felt secret longings, in those dangerous moments when I was left by myself, to know whether the search for the torn letter had or had not taken place.

What wayward creatures we are!

With everything that a woman could want to make her happy, I was ready to put that happiness in peril rather than remain ignorant of what was going on at Gleninch!

And now take the letter.

It asks but one favor of you: it asks to be read by the light of Christ’s teaching⁠—“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”