And the smile was dim too.

Dim and fleeting.

The girl's life had presented itself to me as a tragi-comical adventure, the saddest thing on earth, slipping between frank laughter and unabashed tears.

Yes, the saddest facts and the most common, and, being common perhaps the most worthy of our unreserved pity.
The purely human reality is capable of lyrism but not of abstraction.
Nothing will serve for its understanding but the evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts.

And beginning with Flora de Barral, in the light of my memories I was certain that she at least must have been passive; for that is of necessity the part of women, this waiting on fate which some of them, and not the most intelligent, cover up by the vain appearances of agitation.