Laura Hay

“There would be a perilous moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Yes, he would be kind – kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Mrs. Peniston had kept her imagination shrouded like the drawing room furniture.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Mrs. Bry's admiration was a mirror in which Lily's self-complacency recovered its lost outline. No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity, and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth