"Miss Beatrix, no scapegoat 'Amy' bears away my sins of temper, because, as a naturalist, I am unalterably opposed to the marriage of cousins. I never owned but one sweetheart. She took my unfeathered young affections into her tender hands when she was only ten years old, and so carefully has she preserved them that after twenty years of married life she remains my charming sweetheart--my pearl of womanhood--the supreme joy of my existence. She is the one priceless fossil in my collection, guarded with jealous watchfulness, because she no more resembles the new feminine type than a snowy dove a blind, broken-winged, snapping hawk." "When I marry, my ambition will soar beyond being bottled in alcohol or boxed in sawdust or cotton wool, like a centipede or a cracked egg of the great auk. I should imagine that men who spend their work days among musty, stuffy fossils would rather enjoy the variety of an up-to-date, cultivated wife who kept in touch with social tides and currents. Now, Mr. Herriott, you who prowl about laboratories and museums until you understand their dreary jargon as fully as you do leading a german or playing polo, ought to be a wiser umpire than this one-sided shut-in scientist, who prefers dry bones to living pink flesh." "In the first place, Miss Beatrix, I must, in the absence of Mrs. Cleveden, protest against her husband's classification of her as a fossil. She is alive to her finger tips with enthusiasm for his work, in which she is his ablest assistant, and knowing something of his charming home life, I consider him the most enviable man of my acquaintance. We who are not so fortunate in the matter of sweethearts, must content ourselves with the best available substitute; and you know, 'if one cannot have what one loves, one must love what one has.'" "A defence of fickleness quite unworthy of you; and moreover, Noel, utterly untrue, for of all people in the world you are the very last to surrender anything you really want." "Aunt Katrina, would you have me spend my life wailing for the moon?" "Pooh! You are not so fatuous as to want to drag a surveyor's chain across its cold chasms and jagged heights; and after a brief study of your frozen charmer you would turn your telescope on something accessible and more valuable. Miss Kent, do you consider Noel a fickle person?" Eglah looked up, and, meeting the eyes of her host, they both laughed. "Certainly not. His life-long devotion to you ought to shield him from all suspicion of inconstancy." "Aunt Trina, she is not an impartial umpire. The first time I saw her, a little girl wearing a snowy muslin with blue ribbon bows on her shoulders, we entered into a compact, adopted each other as half-brother and stepsister, and now in supreme trust we form a sort of mutual aid, mutual defence--on my part, admiration--association. If she saw fifty fatal flaws in me she would loyally conceal them from you, who are such a terribly severe censor."