The Venetians quotes

A sudden silence came upon the crowd, tumultuous a moment ago.

A silence fell upon the scene, like a dull, grey veil, gauzy, impalpable, that had dropped from the ceiling.

“Dead,” muttered a voice at Vansittart’s elbow, as the man lay in the midst of them, motionless. “That knife went straight to the heart.”

That savage thrust of the dagger had done its work well. How many daggers and what a gory butchery had been needed to make an end of Caesar; and behold this man was done for with one movement of an angry hand.

For John Vansittart murder had been made easy.

The homeward voyage seemed ever so much longer than the outward, and the gloom of his mind deepened as the summer days wore out;

“To my cost,” pouted Maud. “I haven’t the least idea of what the world is like.

I have to take other people’s word that it is round.

”

“At least, I know that I am not a Radical, and that I hate what people call Progress,” protested Maud.

“Progress means pulling down every historical house and widening every picturesque street, cutting railways through Arcadian valleys, and turning romantic lakes into reservoirs.”

“And progress sometimes means feeding the hungry, and teaching the ignorant,” said her mother, “and building healthy dwellings for people who are herding in poisonous slums. I think we are all agreed as to the necessity for reform, Maud, whether we are Whigs or Tories.”

“

Dear Miss Green! Oh, she would not mind. She is so pleased with her own conversation that it does not matter whether people listen or not.

She is a lady who shakes hands with herself every morning, and says, ‘My dear soul, you are really the cleverest, wittiest, brightest creature I know—not exactly beautiful, but infinitely charming,’ and in that humour she comes smiling down to breakfast, and lets us all …

“Oh, I can’t follow you there,” answered Eve; “everybody is young once.

Youth is as common as chickweed or groundsel, and it lasts such a short time; and if one has to spend that one bright little bit of life in a state of perpetual hard-uppishness, I am sure one deserves to be pitied.

”

“I tell you it is poverty you laugh at—poverty alone that is ridiculous.

We have arrived at a state of things in which there is nothing respected or respectable except money.

We pretend to honour rank and ancient lineage, but in our secret hearts we set no value on either unless sustained by wealth.”

He could not doubt that a happy disposition, a power of rising superior to small sordid cares, was a leading characteristic of her nature.

She had natural cheerfulness, the richest dowry a wife can bring to husband and home.

Presently, as he swung his stick against the light tracery of hawthorn and blackberry, a happy thought occurred to him. His sister had pledged herself to be kind to these motherless girls. Her kindness could not begin too soon.

“Yes, there’s where the offence comes in.

Isn’t it odd that from the moment a man or woman lets other people see that he or she is thoroughly delighted with his or her individuality, talents, beauty, or worldly position, everybody else begins to detest that person?

A Shakespeare or a Scott must go through life with a seeming unconsciousness of his own powers, if he would have his fellow-men love him.”

“I see you are a stickler for blue blood, Colonel Marchant,” he said. “I conclude that is one of the reasons you like Mr. Sefton, who, as I hear in the neighbourhood, is by no means a general favourite.”

“Did you ever hear of a man worth anything who was a general favourite?” grumbled the Colonel.

“Yes, I like Sefton. Sefton is a gentleman to the marrow of his bones—the son and grandson and great-grandson of gentlemen. His ancestors were gentlemen before Magna Charta.

“Dearest, dearest, dearest,” he sighed, when that long kiss had sealed the bond; and then they sat in silence, hand clasped in hand, in the face of the Sussex Weald, and the far-reaching Sussex Downs, and the silvery shimmer of the distant sea.

Oh, Easter Day of deep content! Would either of these two souls ever know such perfect bliss again⁠—the bliss of loving and being loved, while love was still a new thing?

A shrill long cooey broke the silent spell, and they both started up as if awakened out of deepest slumber.

“And you pretended to pilot us, and have only led us astray.”

“Alas! sweet child, the world is full of such pilots.”

“Shall I tell them?” whispered Vansittart, at Eve’s ear.

As for her father—there, though the obligation is small, I grant the difficulty may be great. However, I shall know how to cope with it. No miner ever thought to get gold without some intermixture of quartz.

The Colonel shall be to me as the gold-digger’s quartz.

I shall get rid of him as speedily as I can.”

“

Age is strange and death is stranger; but they must come, Eve.

All we have to hope for is that we may go on loving each other to the end.”

“Happy, with a scoundrel,” exclaimed Vansittart.

“Ah, but she loved him. One does not mind how much scoundrel if one loves a man.”

“A bad principle, Signorina. It is better to love a good man ever so little than a scoundrel ever so much.”

“You were not in a hurry when I overtook you just now. You were walking slowly. You cannot walk faster than I. At Burano I never used to walk. I always ran.”

“Poverina! How quickly you must have used up your island.”

“Yes; it was like a prison. I used to watch the painted sails of the fishing-boats, and long for them to carry me away to any place different from that island, where I knew every face and every paving-stone.

… the drive to Richmond, and at the late luncheon in the pretty upstairs room at the Star and Garter, where the balcony hung high over the smiling valley, over the river that meanders in gracious curves through wooded meadows and past the townlet of “Twicks.”

Happiness is the dominant in the scale of prosperous love.

Why or how should he fail to be happy, adored by this sweet girl, who in less than six weeks was to be his, to have and to hold till death?

The tears welled up in her eyes as she spoke of him.

A brother is not often loved so fondly; hardly ever, unless he is a scamp.

And would she marry him, Jack Vansittart, if she knew that he had killed her brother? Alas, no! That dark story would make an impassable gulf between them.

Fate can but part us. Why should I anticipate evil by taking the initiative? A man who has happiness in his hand and lets it go, for any question of conscience, may be a fine moral character, but he is not the less a fool.

Life is not long enough for scruples that part faithful lovers.

”

The rest of her career is history. Hawberk finished her artistic education, and had the courage to trust the fate of a new opera to an untried singer. The result justified his audacity, and the Vivanti is the rage.

She is original, you see; and a grain of originality is worth a bushel of imitative excellence!

”

If we travel we want Africa and pygmy blackamoors. If we go to the play we want to be startled by the outrageous, rather that awed by the sublime. The stories we read must have some strange background, or be dotted about with unknown tongues.

An author can interest us in a footman if he will only call him a Kitmutghar.

With us the worship of the bizarre marks the highest point of culture.”

The stories we read must have some strange background, or be dotted about with unknown tongues. An author can interest us in a footman if he will only call him a Kitmutghar.

With us the worship of the bizarre marks the highest point of culture.

”

“

I do not think at all about you.

Voglio finirla, io! I have made up my mind that it will be better for you not to come here any more.

They are accepted for the moment; wife and husband “kiss again with tears;” and the next morning at the breakfast-table the husband sees brooding brows, and knows that there is a scorpion coiled in his wife’s heart. Her faith in him has been shaken.

He may scotch the snake, but he cannot kill it.

Eve was glad when Mrs. Montford gave the signal for a move to the drawing-room. The men stayed behind to smoke, all but Sefton, who followed the ladies, a proceeding which Sophy ascribed to his interest in her conversation.

She would exaggerate this fear as she had exaggerated her jealous doubts. She would foresee beggary, and dream of houselessness and starvation. He did not know that to a woman money-troubles are the lightest of all woes.

A husband suspected of infidelity, a child down with measles, will afflict the average woman more than the loss of a fortune.

Sophy was enjoying herself to her uttermost capacity of enjoyment. This was life indeed. It was the last week of the season, the week before Goodwood, and there was a sense of the end of all things in the air.

I doubt if he cares any more for the girls than Orpheus cared for the beasts.

He is false for falsehood’s sake.

”

“Call it prejudice, if you like. I call it instinct.

Birds are prejudiced against cats. I look upon Mr. Sefton as my natural enemy.

”

He cannot forget that all at once. There is a stage in which a man who is inclined to fall in love lets himself drift, don’t you know, Eve? He may be drifting—and it would be a pity to discourage him.”

Every woman is at heart a matchmaker.

Eve yielded, and accepted Sefton’s invitation for five o’clock tea and a little music.

“

My books are a dado by Riviere and Zaehnsdorf.

There are a great many of them with the leaves unopened. I take out a volume now and then, and peep between the pages. One gets the best of a book that way—the flavour without the substance of the author.

“My books are a dado by Riviere and Zaehnsdorf. There are a great many of them with the leaves unopened. I take out a volume now and then, and peep between the pages.

One gets the best of a book that way⁠—the flavour without the substance of the author.

But I came to take you down to tea, Miss Marchant. My banjoist has arrived, and Lady Hartley and Mrs. Montford are doing all they can to spoil him.”

“

Love means more than all,

” said Lisa, doggedly.

“

Ah, madonna mia, we do not make our hearts. They are made for us,

” Lisa pleaded naively. “The Signor Inglese was very good to me at Burano in my poverty; but afterwards, at Venice, I had a good deal to suffer. It was a hard life sometimes.