"North and South"

[fiefoe]

Despite knowing the ending, I stayed up way past my bedtime to get through the dreary bits when Margaret was away from Milton -- only to get about one page worth of a happy ending. That will teach me, surely.

• had even o'erleaped himself so much that he assumed a sort of bitter mirth, like the crackling of thorns under a pot.
• 'Oh dear! a drunken infidel weaver!'
• There's but one thing steady and quiet i' all this reeling world, and, reason or no reason, I'll cling to that.
• I'll not be bound to say I shall end in thinking the same as any man. And I'm not one who think truth can be shaped out in words, all neat and clean, as th' men at th' foundry cut out sheet-iron. Same bones won't go down wi' every one.
• In those days of sore oppression th' Unions began; it were a necessity. It's a necessity now, according to me. It's a withstanding of injustice, past, present, or to come. It may be like war; along wi' it come crimes; but I think it were a greater crime to let it alone.
• tinge of what is called love, but with regret that she had wounded him so deeply,—and with a gentle, patient striving to return to their former position of antagonistic friendship;
• Mrs. Thornton was reviewing all the probable cases in which she had pledged herself to act. She had a fierce pleasure in the idea of telling Margaret unwelcome truths, in the shape of performance of duty.
• Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life.... My precept is, "Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something."
• other circumstances—this stolen visit: it has had all the charm which the French-woman attributed to forbidden pleasures.'
• 'No! you must wait till you see her herself She is too perfect to be known by fragments. No mean brick shall be a specimen of the building of my palace.'
• Women of our class don't go, because they have no power over their emotions, and yet are ashamed of showing them. Poor women go, and don't care if they are seen overwhelmed with grief.
• He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.
• The inspector ran all this over in his mind—the vagueness of the evidence to prove that Margaret had been at the station—the unflinching, calm denial which she gave to such a supposition. She stood awaiting his next word with a composure that appeared supreme.
• had no thought of penitence before God; nothing but chaos and night surrounded the one lurid fact that, in Mr. Thornton's eyes, she was degraded.
• His cause for contempt was so just, that she should have respected him less if she had thought he did not feel contempt. It was a pleasure to feel how thoroughly she respected him. He could not prevent her doing that; it was the one comfort in all this misery.
• By-and-by they'll find out, tyrants makes liars.'
• I could go o'er him wi' a plough mysel', wi' a' the pleasure in life.'
• Meddling 'twixt master and man is liker meddling 'twixt husband and wife than aught else: it takes a deal o' wisdom for to do ony good.
• I never knew Fanny have weighty reasons for anything.
• But never let me hear any one say a word against her, implying any more serious imputation than that she now needs the counsel of some kind and gentle woman.
• And I think I could bear up against—at any rate, I could have the energy to resent, Mrs. Thornton's unjust, impertinent suspicions. But it is hard to feel how completely he must misunderstand me.
• 'Yo've called me impudent, and a liar, and a mischief-maker, and yo' might ha' said wi' some truth, as I were now and then given to drink. An' I ha' called you a tyrant, an' an oud bull-dog, and a hard, cruel master; that's where it stands. But for th' childer. Measter, do yo' think we can e'er get on together?' 'Well!' said Mr. Thornton, half-laughing, 'it was not my proposal that we should go together. But there's one comfort, on your own showing. We neither of us can think much worse of the other than we do now.'
• 'And you thought there would be nothing left of us but an opinion, like the Kilkenny cat's tail.
• How evil he was to-night; possessed by ill-humour at being detained so long from her; irritated by the mention of some name, because he thought it belonged to a more successful lover; now ill-tempered because he had been unable to cope, with a light heart, against one who was trying, by gay and careless speeches, to make the evening pass pleasantly away,
• Sometimes he says a rough thing or two, which is not agreeable to look at at first, but has a queer smack o' truth in it when yo' come to chew it.
• seemed worth more than all the other privileges—she might be unhappy if she liked.
• 'He gave you strength to do what your conscience told you was right; and I don't see that we need any higher or holier strength than that; or wisdom either.
• Alas! and that was the way in which this eighteen months in Milton—to him so unspeakably precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the rest of life's sweetness—would be remembered... It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies,
• compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.
• But it seemed childish to relinquish a plan which I had once thought wise and well-laid, just because I myself did not receive all the honour and consequence due to the originator. So I coolly took the part assigned to me, which is something like that of steward to a club. I buy in the provisions wholesale, and provide a fitting matron or cook.'
• 'Nothing like the act of eating for equalising men. Dying is nothing to it.
• seldom, I imagine, any cases of morbid conscience.' He was becoming more and more vexed, and forgetting his lately-caught trick of good manners.
• 'It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious.
• I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.
• 'If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt, if that is not Irish.
• Every talent, every feeling, every acquirement; nay, even every tendency towards virtue was used up as materials for fireworks; the hidden, sacred fire, exhausted itself in sparkle and crackle.
• hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
• Only to please me, darling, don't go and have a strong mind; t's the only thing I ask. Footman or no footman, don't be strong-minded.'
• them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact. Such intercourse is the very breath of life.