Florence Converse

“And her work! Oh, the thought of being deprived of that! With only his love in return, his love and his amiable domestic tyranny!”

“After a while, when she has forgotten him a little, when she realizes that her life and her are more to her than any man, she will tell me about it.”

“She is of the race of Jeanne d’Arc, this Northern girl, in her voice, her bearing, her beliefs. That kind if not to be possessed by one man; she belongs to a cause, to the people.”

“But a girl’s love is not a woman’s love; above all, it is not a modern woman’s love. I, at thirty, cannot accept your views, adopt your methods, and believe your heresies, as you might be able to teach me to do if I were eighteen, - and if I loved you. I have found out my own life-truths, and they do not accord with yours.”

“I know you do not understand what I am trying to tell you; I know you do not understand, because it is the thing that goes deepest into my heart, and there are no words as deep down as that. How can I make you know the reality of it? The world has spattered us all over with words, with cant phrases, with sarcasm, and with fulsome flattery. The world has been so officiously eager to explain for us the thing we mean and the worth of the thing that now, when we try to speak, our meaning is veiled, concealed, smothered, by the hideous volubility of facile expression. How can it have any reality for you when you hear only words about it?”