She seemed to have grown tired of waiting for the sound of his voice; it was with a kind of surprise that she heard him say: 'You limit yourself wisely, Stephen!' 'How do you mean ?' she asked, making a great effort to speak.
'You would promise to love and honour; but there isn't anything about obeying.' As he spoke Leonard stretched himself again luxuriously, and laughed with the intellectual arrogance of a man who is satisfied with a joke, however inferior, of his own manufacture.

Stephen looked at him with a long look which began in anger--that anger which comes from an unwonted sense of impotence, and ends in tolerance, the intermediate step being admiration.
It is the primeval curse that a woman's choice is to her husband; and it is an important part of the teaching of a British gentlewoman, knit in the very fibres of her being by the remorseless etiquette of a thousand years, that she be true to him.

The man who has in his person the necessary powers or graces to evoke admiration in his wife, even for a passing moment, has a stronghold unconquerable as a rule by all the deadliest arts of mankind.
Leonard Everard was certainly good to look upon as he lolled at his ease on that summer morning.

Tall, straight, supple; a typical British gentleman of the educated class, with all parts of the body properly developed and held in some kind of suitable poise.
As Stephen looked, the anxiety and chagrin which tormented her seemed to pass.

She realised that here was a nature different from her own, and which should be dealt with in a way unsuitable to herself; and the conviction seemed to make the action which it necessitated more easy as well as more natural to her.