Sublime

St Dunstan was a marvellous person and very much like you—mad about learning, terribly stiff and stern and scowly, and an absolute wizard at withstanding temptation. Do you know that the Devil once came to tempt him in the form of a fascinating woman, and he caught her nose in his goldsmith’s tongs and gave it a terrible twist?”

‘She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she has married him,’ said Will to himself.

But if a man was not up to this level of heroism and self-denial, if he did not possess what the Church called ‘the gift of continency’, then he might marry; it was better to marry than to burn. But it was seen as a concession for the weak.

‘That is it, you see. One never knows. I should have thought Chettam was just the sort of man a woman would like, now.’ ‘Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle,’ said Dorothea, feeling some of her late irritation revive. Mr Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a

Some of the clergy, as Erasmus pointed out, adopted as part of their occupational identity a halting gait that was thought to denote intense internal musings, a habit (or affectation, according to your viewpoint) that was still being satirized by Jane Austen at the start of the nineteenth century.

she,—I mean Lucy,—has never been in the slightest hurry to be married;—that's all. But I shall regard it as a lapsus-lingua in you."

the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid

She had accepted her whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on the superfluities of her lot.