"The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other."

“I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”

“People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.”

“You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.”

“The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.”

“Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two.”

“I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.”