true love, victorian style

"The woman I fixed my eye on, was the woman who kept house for me at my cottage. Her name was Selina Golby. I agree with the late William Cobbett about picking a wife. See that she chews her food well, and sets her foot down firmly on the ground when she walks, and you're all right. Selina Goby was all right in both these respects, which was one reason for marrying her. I had another reason, likewise, entirely of my own discovering. Selina, being a single woman, made me pay so much a week for her board and services. Selina, being my wife, couldn't charge for her board, and would have to give me her services for nothing. That was the point of view I looked at it from. Economy--with a dash of love. I put it to my mistress, as in duty bound, just as I had put it to myself.
'I have been turning Selina Goby over in my mind,' I said, 'and I think, my lady, it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep her.'"
--The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

don't look back

"She did not look behind her, but she knew exactly how Bruce and Chester felt when they knelt at the lip of the well and saw the white, furred-out shapes of their pets floating, lifting motionless to the motionless lifting of earthbound water in a dark, earth-smelling hole under the rain."
--The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner

poetry in prose

"Sometimes while she was writing, a slip of one of these street conversations insinuated itself into a poem, and what had been fleeting and anonymous was set down in print. So much of writing was about not saying this, not saying that, the obvious crossed out, whole pages of notes not used, and then purely by chance, a stranger's talk suddenly mattered. Unpredictably, a scrap of the world seized up and glowed."
...............................................
"She was the space between the sole of a shoe and the pavement, the air rattling in a loose windowpane, the sound no one listened to, like trouser legs rubbing together. Gray and loose, and unnoticed."
--Holy Skirts, Rene Steinke