Dalgliesh

“The world bore a different aspect for her; the air blew differently, the clouds floated with another motion. To look out over the plain, and away to the blue hills in the distance, with all their variety of slopes, and the infinite sweet depths of colour and atmosphere about them, was beyond all example delightful, quite enough to fill life and make it happy. In the heavenly silence she began to put her thoughts into words, as in her youth she had done always when she was deeply moved. Oh, who are they that seek pleasure in the world, in society, in feasts and merrymakings, when it is here, at their hand, ready for their enjoyment? This was her theme. The sunset upon the hills was enough for any one; he who could not find his happiness in that, where would he find it?”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“But human nature, even in a child, soon wants something more, and in Margaret the demand came very quickly. She”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“judgment, to which unfortunately Mr. Bonamy did not make much response. The Vice-Consul indeed had that half-painful, half-amused sense of being a better man than his son-in-law, which at once increases the pang of such a rivalry and makes it ludicrous. “Having known me to decline on a range of lower feelings, and a narrower heart than mine.” When a father utters in the depths of his own heart such a sentiment as this, it may be somewhat bitterly, but it must be with a sense that it is utterly ludicrous. Mr. Bonamy felt all through like the disappointed lover in the poem “Thou shalt lower to his level day by day;” for indeed Rita herself, when she became Mrs. Harry, soon came to have far less interest in matters”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“But opposition and a desire to have the better of one’s domestic and intimate opponents is very strong”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant