Condemning bright colors, frills, and jewelry as vain and worldly, Susan accepted plain somber clothing as a mark of righteousness, and when she deviated to the extent of wearing the Scotch-plaid coat which her mother had bought her, she wondered if the big rent torn in it by a dog might not be deserved punishment for her pride in wearing it.
— from Susan B. Anthony Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian by Alma Lutz

In her own genre, so to say, she was as finished, as impossible of improvement, as an Elgin marble, a Grecian urn, a bit of Chinese blue and white, a fan of old Japan, a Vermeer, a Whistler symphony, a caricature by Max Beerbohm.
— from Turns about Town by Robert Cortes Holliday

"If the situation was different, my bantam, I'd admit that what you say might turn out true; but your people haven't any idea that Oliver Benson is anywhere except in the jail at Valparaiso, and will set it all down to the account of the Typees.
— from With Porter in the Essex A Story of His Famous Cruise in the Southern Waters During the War of 1812 by James Otis

For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither she would, and do with them whatever she chose; and the elder woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and violent attachment which she had given their father, concealed all she felt that she might retain them near her, whilst the [227] secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it possible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.
— from Othmar by Ouida