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! (查看原文)
“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 as if I’d never before understood with how much that
is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid.” (查看原文)
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.
...
"I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up."
(查看原文)
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 taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. (查看原文)
Ellen: "For us? But there's no us in that sense!" We're near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen Olanska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them." (查看原文)
Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her give him the rest of her evening. Ignoring her question, he continued to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power to make her drop them. (查看原文)
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was gathering. It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers... (查看原文)
She sang, of course,"M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. (查看原文)
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the
young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm
consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the
women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied. In this
view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly
female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer’s belief that when “such things
happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always
criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded
any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and
designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The
only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice
girl, and then trust... (查看原文)
He was not sure that he wanted to see the
Countess Olenska again; but ever since he had looked at her from the path
above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place
she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he
had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing was with him
day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a
sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not
see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not
conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He
simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she
walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world
might see... (查看原文)
