jacob graham’s Reviews > North and South > Status Update

"Margaret fancied that he could not be well; but in answer to some enquiry of hers as to his health, he sent her a short note, saying there was an old-fashioned complaint called the spleen . . . but that he should like to indulge himself in grumbling, without being obliged to send a bulletin every time."

". . . [S]he might be unhappy if she liked. For months past, all her personal cares and troubles had had to be stuffed away into a dark cupboard; but now she had leisure to take them out, and mourn over them, and study their nature, and seek the true method of subduing them into the elements of peace . . . Now, once for all she would consider them, and appoint to each of them its right work in her life."

2/2: "'Some time, if I live to be an old woman, I may sit over the fire, and, looking into the embers, see the life that might have been,' . . . She went out, going rapidly towards the country, and trying to drown reflection by swiftness of motion."

1/2: "'What has happened to make me so morbid to-day? I do not know. I only know I cannot help it. I must give way sometimes. No, I will not though . . . I will not think of myself and my own position. I will not examine into my own feelings. It would be of no use now . . .'"

"I reckon . . . by-and-by they'll find out, tyrants makes liars."

"Miss Hale might love another—was indifferent and contemptuous to him—but he would yet do her faithful acts of service of which she should never know. He might despise her, but the woman whom he had once loved should be kept from shame; and shame it would be . . . to stand and acknowledge her reason for desiring darkness rather than light."

1/2: ". . .[A]ll sorts of wild fancies chased each other like dreams through his mind. Here was a little piece of miserable, gnawing confirmation. 'She bore up better than likely' under this grief. She had then some hope . . . to lighten the dark hours of a daughter newly made motherless."

"He said to himself, that he hated Margaret, but a wild, sharp sensation of love cleft his dull, thunderous feeling like lightning . . . His greatest comfort was . . . in feeling . . . that though she might despise him, contemn him, treat him with her proud, sovereign indifference, he did not change one whit. She could not make him change. He loved her, & would love her; & defy her, & this miserable bodily pain."

"She would banish all recollection of the Thornton family,—no need to think of them till they absolutely stood before her in flesh and blood. But, of course, the effort not to think of them brought them only the more strongly before her; and from time to time, the hot flush came over her pale face sweeping it into colour, as a sunbeam from between watery clouds comes swiftly moving over the sea."

"Margaret's whole soul rose up against him while he reasoned in this way—as if commerce were everything and humanity nothing . . . How reconcile those eyes, that voice, with the hard, reasoning, dry, merciless way in which he laid down axioms of trade, and serenely followed them out to their full consequences? The discord jarred upon her inexpressibly."