"Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocnce, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!"
"“At least,” she continued, “it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don’t know how to explain myself”—she drew together her troubled brows—“but it seems"
"Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile."
"But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands-- and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness brought by disloyalty and crulety and indifference. That was what I'd never know before-- and it's better than anything I've known."
"That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was birn in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been t"