65
" My cough is much worse at night and often prevents me from sleeping. It is not so much the daytime tiredness that I resent, but the inability to proceed uninter- rupted with my dreams, to run and play with my fancies, and, at last, in the early hours of the morning, to be visited with visions like a holy madman. The dreamer is like a Delian diver, fishing for pearls from the depths of our inner sea of knowledge; and I must have solved, or rather resolved, many more problems in my sleep than in my conscious hours. "
― Neel Burton , Plato: Letters to my Son
67
" She loathed her profile almost as much as she loathed the dress. If she didn't have to worry about people mistaking her for a boy--- not that they really did, but they couldn't stop remarking on the resemblance; at any rate, if she didn't have to worry about that--- she would never again wear pink. Or pearls. There was something dreadfully banal about the way the pearls shimmered.
For a moment she distracted herself by mentally ripping her dress apart, stripping it of its ruffles and pearls and tiny sleeves. Given a choice, she would dress in plum-colored silk and sleek her hair away from her face without a single flyaway curl. Her only hair adornment would be an enormous feather--- a black one--- arching backward so it brushed her shoulder. If her sleeves were elbow-length, she could trim them with a narrow edging of black fur. Or perhaps swansdown, with the same at the neck. Or she could put a feather trim at the neck; the white would look shocking against the plum velvet.
That led to the idea that she could put a ruff at the neck and trim that with a narrow strip of swansdown,. It would be even better if the sleeves weren't opaque fabric but nearly transparent, like that new Indian silk her friend Lucinda had been wearing the previous night, and she would have them quite wide, so they billowed and gathered tight at the elbow. Or perhaps the wrist would be more dramatic.... "
― Eloisa James , The Ugly Duchess (Fairy Tales, #4)
