“‘But if you failed to ask it, you might miss out on the fact that the pulchritudinous Miss Westmoreland lives there.’ He pronounced it pulchritoooodinous, savoring the word as it came out, treating it like it was a butterscotch lozenge.”
Which Works on Parakeets
“Her worries fluttered for a moment, the way her parakeet had done once in her hand for a moment. But she just put it back in the cage, and dropped the cloth over the top of it.”
The Envious Kind
“A certain kind of beauty flourishes when another kind is diminished.”
With a Ladle on the Large Side
“Lambeth actually knew how to be charming if he had a willing audience. If anybody was watching who knew what actual charm was, the effect was totally other than charming, but whenever someone wanted to be charmed—as Elizabeth most certainly did—he knew how to ladle it out of the pot.”
How Humility Deflects
“Many good men do not suspect the cause of the antipathy directed at them because they are too humble to think they might be the object of anything like envy.”
Which Is Pretty Quick
“But when he was away from her, when he was left alone with his own thoughts, his intellectual confidence that he would eventually win her would evaporate like dew off a melon in August.”
Why Not, If the Play Usually Works?
“She also had a definite sense that here was a man on the verge of declaring himself, declaring his affections. She had been in this situation before, and she could tell that in this one respect, he was not departing from the playbook that all men apparently had.”
Which Can Be a Fierce Look
“Savannah remembered a book she had read years before when she was a little girl in which the heroine had tossed her curls. She thought of doing that now, but didn’t do anything. But the way she stood there at the doorway looked as though she just had tossed them.”
Motions of Time
“The time until Sunday morning went by so slowly that it ached, and after she spoke with him about meeting the next day, that time flew by so quickly there were a few moments she thought she felt the breeze in her hair.”
Unwanted Weight
“Thomas felt like one of the stones from the brook had somehow made it into his stomach, one of the rounded ones the size of a couple of fists.”