On the first occasion she had sat next Henry James at dinner, she had not been able to resist putting to him certain questions about his books, for she had been a lifelong admirer of them, and that, at last, after he had answered some of these murmured inquiries, he had turned his melancholy gaze upon her, and had said to her, 'Can it be- it must be- that you are that embodiment of the incorporeal, the elusive yet ineluctable being to whom through the generations novelists have so unavailingly made invocation; in short, the Gentle Reader? I have often wondered in what guise you would appear or, as it were, what incarnation you would assume.'

Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently wha…

Somehow she had thought of him so much that when she actually saw him again her affection seemed cooler. Had she worn out the passion by dint of constancy?

She thought that most women make a great mistake in allowing dress to be the master instead of the servant of their good looks; many women were, she considered…

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have r…