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She hates the "stuffy" life of a hausfrau, but marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with Alfred who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. She dares, but doesn't dare enough. "It needs both force and earnestness to sin."
He unfastened the door in the ivy-laced wall, and waited. This apparent indifference alarmed him. He would far rather that she had rushed in all the fire of jealousy to Hintock House, regardless of conventionality, confronted and attacked Felice Charmond unguibus et rostro, and accused her even in exaggerated shape of stealing away her husband. Such a storm might have cleared the air.
All his doubts came flooding back, and his terrors for, in some of its aspects, the idea of being married to this delicate flower of conventionality and gentle breeding was literally a terror to him.
Another moment, and the young girl was alone with her thoughts. We might stop here and wonder at the mysterious conventionality that is influencing all our lives now-a-days. It is not a deception, and yet its consequences are often the same. Here was a striking instance of its existence.
My dear, you have acquired a freedom you have emancipated yourself from conventionality and I suppose I must congratulate you. Laura only stood there, with her eyes fixed, without answering the sally, and Selina went on, with another change of tone: 'And pray if he was there, what is there so monstrous? Hasn't it happened that he is in London when I am there?
When I have met her before, I have thought her a curiously guarded personality, appearing to live a secret and absorbing life of her own, impenetrable, and holding up a shield of conventionality against the world. To-night she laid down her shield, and I saw the beating of a very pure and loving heart.
The first man who entirely broke through the conventionality of his time, and painted pure landscape, was Masaccio, but he died too young to effect the revolution of which his genius was capable. It was left for other men to accomplish, namely, for Correggio and Titian.
And then I gathered myself together and in a tone that made me hate myself as I heard it, I added slowly, each word sharp and distinct: "But what will conventionality bid you say to-morrow morning, as we drive down crowded Fifth Avenue, after a night in this brougham?" I could not see her, for she fell back into the darkness as sharply as if I had struck her with all my force full in the face.
"Will you let me for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one might speak who has passed the confines of this world?
"Now in truth, papa, do not all your fine words signify about what you and mamma used to say years ago, 'You must be a good little girl, and then you will be happy'? It seems to me that many good people are conventionality itself." "Many are, and if they ARE good, it is a fortunate phase of conventionality.
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