"'What does it all mean?' he asked.
"'I can't tell,' she answered. 'Do you know, after they trepanned you for the first time you said suddenly, "Es tu là?" and reached out your hand to me, and I took your hand ... and I kept saying to myself, "It is very well with me," which is what the country people about here say when they are glad.'"
Sir William builds a replica of the fourteenth-century castle and Dionissia ruminates on the future.
"'In the summer it will be very pleasant: the birds will sing, and we shall walk in the gardens. And in the winter we shall go into our little castle, and we shall sit by our fire, and our friends will come and we shall pass the time in talking and devising. And all around us there will be the oceans of time and the ages of space——'
"'I've heard that before,' he said.
"'Yes, certainly you've heard all that before,' she answered. 'It's nothing new; it's the oldest wisdom or the oldest folly. You will find it in Chaucer ... you will find it in the Bible, because there's nothing else really to say.... It's the only thing that's worth saying in life.'"
Quite another vein is struck in The Good Soldier, which is essentially a modern novel. It is a story of betrayals. The man who tells the story finds that his wife is the mistress of his friend, the good soldier.
"I can't believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks."
Edward Ashburnham, the man in the case, "was the cleanest-looking sort of chap: an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords in Hampshire."