You may laugh at me if you like, but have n't such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and does n't history notoriously repeat itself?
There was a little Spanish girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!...

The Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray?
I 've dreamt of it, sometimes every night for a month.

I won't tell you I have been to consult those old women who advertise in the newspapers; you 'll call me an old imbecile.

Imbecile if you please! I have refused magnificent offers because I believed that somehow or other--if wars and revolutions were needed to bring it about--we should have nothing less than that.

There might be another coup d'etat somewhere, and another brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife! At last, however," Mrs.Light proceeded with incomparable gravity, "since the overturning of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen, and the expulsion of all those dear little old-fashioned Italian grand-dukes, and the dreadful radical talk that is going on all over the world, it has come to seem to me that with Christina in such a position I should be really very nervous.