Euphemism

that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay before me.

…for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. She was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category.

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring belief that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out," were not.

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes."

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper.

They wept together, for the things they now knew.

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.

Even in death the boys were trouble. The secret graveyard lay on the north side of the Nickel campus, in a patchy acre of wild grass, this stubborn scrub that grew and died back in patches throughout the seasons.