“She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] […]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.”

—  Henry James, book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XII.

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Henry James154
American novelist, short story author, and literary critic 1843–1916

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