Johannes Vermeer Woman with a Pearl Necklace painting

contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing but scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my fate: to lose a son and find a freak?"
"Whatever I am, father dear," Saladin told the older man, "I owe it all to you."
It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to run high, for all Nasreen's attempts at mediation, _you must apologize to your father, darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride won't let him hug you_. Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh, her husband, attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend. "Same material is the problem," Kasturba told Nasreen. "Daddy and sonny, same material, same to same."
When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a kind of defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, "to show that Hindus--Muslims can love as well as hate," she pointed out. Changez saw a look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to putting

Paul Cezanne Apples Peaches Pears and Grapes painting

Castor looked from one face to the other and said slowly:
"So there's something between you two, is there?"
Livilla smiled scornfully: "And suppose there is? Who's the better man?"
Castor shouted: "All right, my girl, we'll see. Just forget for a moment that I'm Protector of the People, Sejanus, and put your fists up."
Sejanus folded his arms.
"Put them up, I say, you coward."
Sejanus said nothing, so Castor struck him hard across the face with his open palm. "Now get out!"
Sejanus went out with an ironical obeisance and Livilla followed him.
This blow settled Castor's fate. The account that Tiberius heard from Sejanus, who came to him with the mark of Castor's slap still red on his cheek, was that Castor had been drunk when Sejanus had congratulated him on his protectorship and had struck him across the face saying:
"Yes, it's good to feel that I can do this now without fear

Thomas Kinkade The Garden of Prayer painting

Livy was already going away. But Pollio grinned at the retreating back and said in a loud voice for his benefit:the spring or drinking it-and I'm told that they do both things simultaneously-Paduans are able to believe whatever they like and believe it so strongly that they can make anyone else believe it. That's how the city has got such a wonderful commercial reputation. The blankets and rugs they make there are really no better than
"A decent fellow, Livy is, but there's one thing wrong with him. It's a disease called Faduanity."
This made Livy stop and rum round. "What's wrong with Padua? I won't hear a word against the place."
Follio explained to me. "It's where he was born, you know. Somewhere in the Northern Provinces. There's a famous hot-spring there, of extraordinary properties. You can always tell a Paduan. By bathing in the water of

John Singleton Copley The Death of Major Pierson painting

forever, among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the tress, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird. ‘ “Bridey” Marchmain’s eldest girl,’ they said. ‘Pity he can’t see her tonight.’ That night and the night after, wherever she went always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of Joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life one who had suddenly