““The first of these occupations Kate Chester loved. Give her a book, and she could be happy still. It was one of the few pleasures that remained to her quite intact, quite unmarred by all that had come and gone. Allow her to sit on the rug, and burn her face; allow her to bury herself in some essay, some life, some account of how better men and women than she had comported themselves, had borne sorrow, had borne joy, and done great things, and thought them little, and how, at last, they had departed this life, as she should have to depart it soon or late; and she seemed once more to be the free-hearted, joyous Kate Chester of two years ago, to whom life was a continual feast. These books did her ever so much good; they took her out of herself, took away, quite, for the time, her morbid self-pity and continued introvision, substituted for them wider sympathies, broader fields of compassion; effaced for a while her own narrow circle of interests, replaced them with higher, nobler interests—interests””
![“Beauty is a fading flower;”[3] and, applied particularly to woman’s loveliness, there is none more favourite among that bundle of dull platitudes, of insipid, trite commonplaces which enrol themselves under the head of moral maxims. Of course it is true—tiresomely, provokingly, heart-breakingly…” quote by Rhoda Broughton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/16a/rhoda-broughton-25508_beauty_beauty-is-a-fading-flower-3-and-applied_371805.jpg)
![“To how few people a premonition of what is going to happen to them, either of sweet or sour, is vouchsafed! Is it a blessing or a curse? A blessing, I suppose, on the principle of “whatever is, is right”[376]—-a blessing even apart from that doctrine, I think. Would the delight of gloating over…” quote by Rhoda Broughton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/3d3/rhoda-broughton-25508_blessings_to-how-few-people-a-premonition-of-what_666590.jpg)
