Sublime

‘Caleb likes taking trouble: he is one of those men who always do more than any one would have thought of asking them to do,’ answered Mrs Garth. She was knitting, and could either look at Fred or not, as she chose – always an advantage when one is bent on loading speech with salutary meaning; and though Mrs Garth intended to be duly reserved, she

‘Patience, Stella. Patience and poise. One moment of distemper can be as damaging to your skin as two éclairs.’

Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything – nothing else ‘answered’; and Lydgate supposed that ‘if things were done at all, they must be done properly’ – he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure

She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her husband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’s frilling, and had

It did not occur to him that Lydgate’s marriage was not delightful: he believed, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable, docile creature, though he had always thought her rather uninteresting – a little too much the pattern-card of the finishing-school;

the cover design for Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers is, very satisfyingly, half finished:

They were both tall, and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond’s infantine blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large embroidered collar which it was to be hoped all beholders would know the price of, her small hands du