In all this there was much less discrimination than in that desire for comprehensiveness of development on which he had been used to exercise his wit.

There was a kind of violence in some of her impulses, of crudity in some of her experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to him that she even spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before her marriage.
Certainly she had fallen into exaggerations--she who used to care so much for the pure truth; and whereas of old she had a great delight in good-humoured argument, in intellectual play (she never looked so charming as when in the genial heat of discussion she received a crushing blow full in the face and brushed it away as a feather), she appeared now to think there was nothing worth people's either differing about or agreeing upon.

Of old she had been curious, and now she was indifferent, and yet in spite of her indifference her activity was greater than ever.

Slender still, but lovelier than before, she had gained no great maturity of aspect; yet there was an amplitude and a brilliancy in her personal arrangements that gave a touch of insolence to her beauty.

Poor human-hearted Isabel, what perversity had bitten her?
Her light step drew a mass of drapery behind it; her intelligent head sustained a majesty of ornament.