Sublime

When he bought a sandwich from a food cart, his voice was so soft that he had to repeat himself three times in order to be heard.

in

Because she saw that he was, in essence, alone. In his vast solitude she would find hers—and with it, the freedom her overbearing parents had always denied her.

But David astonished me. “Poor Mum,” he said, “I guess she’s better off, really.” Now what was I to make of that, from a boy of fourteen?

But I had no time to waste in being humiliated, for when Surgeoner looked me in the face I knew him at once for the tramp I had last seen in the pit at Deptford.

indolent

My mother, the doctor thought, was waiting for my arrival and might not last the night. “Dying of what?” I asked him. “Nothing, everything.”