Duel In The Sun Quotes

A red-gold glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them as an edge of dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemort's was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco's wand: "Avada Kedavra!" "Expelliarmus!" The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort's green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling, spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last.

Odysseus had told me once that half of a duel is maneuvering around the sun, trying to get the light to stab at your enemy's eyes. But I was the blood of Helios, and no light could blind me.

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.

The concept of barroom shoot-outs and duels in the sun have no part in our tradition either, possibly because we have had so few barrooms and so little sun. (It is awkward to reach efficiently for a six-gun while wearing a parka and two pairs of mittens.)

She put her hand on his shoulder and gave a soft squeeze. She did not know what else to do. First her mother, then her father and Fanen, and finally Hilfred—they were all gone. Mauvin was slipping away as well. The boy who loved his sword more than Wintertide presents, sweet chocolate cake, or swimming on a hot day refused to touch it anymore. The eldest son of Count Pickering, who had once challenged the sun to a duel because it had rained on the day of a hunt, spent his days watching ducks.

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy because they say that in verse I give the world your me. They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos. Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice because you are the dressing and the essence is me; and the most profound abyss is spread between us. You are the cold doll of social lies, and me, the virile starburst of the human truth. You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me; in all my poems I undress my heart. You are like your world, selfish; not me who gambles everything betting on what I am. You are only the ponderous lady very lady; not me; I am life, strength, woman. You belong to your husband, your master; not me; I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought. You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me; the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me. You are a housewife, resigned, submissive, tied to the prejudices of men; not me; unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante snorting horizons of God's justice. You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you; your husband, your parents, your family, the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall, the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne, heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say." Not in me, in me only my heart governs, only my thought; who governs in me is me. You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people. You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone, while me, my nothing I owe to nobody. You nailed to the static ancestral dividend, and me, a one in the numerical social divider, we are the duel to death who fatally approaches. When the multitudes run rioting leaving behind ashes of burned injustices, and with the torch of the seven virtues, the multitudes run after the seven sins, against you and against everything unjust and inhuman, I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Seven...eight...nine... Some in the crowd shuffled for positions where they could have a better view. By now it was close to four o'clock, and the sun was setting slightly in the west. What that morning had been close to zero weather was now in the mid-forties. The dueling field, which had been sparkling with the morning frost was now dry.

Running isn’t simply a discipline,” he said. “It can become a compulsion—it can become like a god. If you worship this god, you forget everything else. And when you lose this god, you’ve got nothing.

Deja la frase en suspenso. En lugar de terminarla, me acaricia la mejilla con el dorso de la mano. El gesto me agarra desprevenido, funde hasta el último de mis átomos, porque es tan inesperado, tan tierno… Al igual que su mirada. Me duele el pecho de pura alegría, como si fuera un caballo que se zambulle en un río.

In time [the newsboys] developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them--some as young as five years old--being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.

I spin in the trail to face Kat, who raises her own walking stick to meet mine. ‘A duel to the death?’ Kat says, giggling. I laugh, too, and we spar for a moment playfully until Kat gently presses the tip of her stick into my chest. ‘On your knees and beg for mercy.’ Oh, god. This feels silly and dangerous at the same time. I kneel. I look up at Kat, beautiful and fierce standing there with the setting sun in her hair and her face so stern. Only her eyes are full of mirth. I stare. ‘Close your eyes, prisoner.’ I giggle stupidly, my heart leaping at the point of her stick. ‘Close your eyes. And stop laughing.’ I try to obey, shaking a little. Katy moves her makeshift lance to my neck, pressing gently. ‘Close em.’ I close my eyes, serious at last. There is a long silence, and I feel genuinely vulnerable for a moment, as though Kat really does have a sword to my neck. Then I feel the stick come down gently and touch each of my shoulders. ‘I… dub… thee… mine,’ says Kat softly. ‘Sealed with a kiss.’ The stick falls to the forest floor behind her. She kneels down in front of me and touches my face with both hands. It’s all I can do to stay here, to be here, to hold still.

The Isle of Pines was Circe's isle, with white marble columns here and there in the dark, green, and pirates would be dueling with a flash of clashing swords and a flash of recklessly smiling white teeth. The Gulf, like the Caribbean, is haunted by the ghosts of the old buccaneers. Tampico, to Pete, wasn't the industrial shipping port his father knew. It had palaces and parrots of many colors, and winding white roads. It was an Arabian Nights city, with robed magicians wandering the streets, benign most of the time, but with gnarled hands like tree-roots that could weave spells. Manoel, his father, could have told him a different story, for Manoel had shipped once under sail, in the old days, before he settled down to a fisherman's life in Cabrillo. But Manoel didn't talk a great deal. Men talk to men, not to boys, and that was why Pete didn't learn as much as he might have from the sun-browned Portuguese who went out with the fishing fleets. He got his knowledge out of books, and strange books they were, and strange knowledge. ("Before I Wake...")

Ad – Add               Ail – Ale               Air – Heir               Are - R               Ate - Eight               Aye - Eye - I                 B                            B – Be - Bee               Base - Bass               Bi – Buy - By – Bye               Bite - Byte               Boar - Bore               Board - Bored                 C               C – Sea - See               Capital – Capitol               Chord – Cord               Coarse - Course               Core - Corps               Creak – Creek               Cue – Q - Queue                 D               Dam - Damn               Dawg – Dog               Days – Daze               Dew – Do – Due               Die – Dye               Dual - Duel                 E               Earn – Urn               Elicit – Illicit               Elude - Illude               Ex – X                 F               Fat – Phat               Faze - Phase               Feat - Feet               Find – Fined               Flea – Flee               Forth - Fourth                 G               Gait – Gate               Genes – Jeans               Gnawed - Nod               Grate – Great                 H               Hair - Hare               Heal - Heel               Hear - Here               Heard - Herd               Hi - High               Higher – Hire               Hoarse - Horse               Hour - Our                 I               Idle - Idol               Ill – Ill               In – Inn               Inc – Ink               IV – Ivy                 J               Juggler - Jugular                 K               Knead - Need               Knew - New               Knight - Night               Knot – Naught - Not               Know - No               Knows - Nose                 L               Lead – Led               Lie - Lie               Light – Lite               Loan - Lone                 M               Mach – Mock               Made - Maid               Mane – Main               Meat - Meet               Might - Mite               Mouse - Mouth                 N               Naval - Navel               None - Nun                 O               Oar - Or – Ore               One - Won                 P               Paced – Paste               Pail – Pale                            Pair - Pear               Peace - Piece               Peak - Peek               Peer - Pier               Pray - Prey                 Q               Quarts - Quartz                 R               Rain - Reign               Rap - Wrap               Read - Red               Real - Reel               Right - Write               Ring - Wring                 S               Scene - Seen               Seas – Sees - Seize               Sole – Soul               Some - Sum               Son - Sun               Steal – Steel               Suite - Sweet                 T               T - Tee               Tail – Tale               Team – Teem               Their – There - They’re               Thyme - Time               To – Too - Two                 U               U - You                 V               Vale - Veil               Vain – Vane - Vein               Vary – Very               Verses - Versus                 W               Waive - Wave               Ware – Wear - Where               Wait - Weight               Waist - Waste               Which - Witch               Why – Y               Wood - Would                 X                 Y               Yoke - Yolk               Yore - Your – You’re                 Z

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives—a “harem,” Locke called it—six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and “had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays.” (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.)

In my mind I saw, clearly, that straight-backed figure on the dapple-gray horse, his long black cloak slung back over the animal’s haunches, his plumed helm of command on his head. With either phenomenal courage or outright arrogance he had ignored the possibility of our arrows, the crowned sun stitched on his tunic gleaming in the noonday light as he directed the day’s battle.

So once again on an early spring day, I was ensconced in a coach rolling down the middle of the Street of the Sun. Again people lined the street, but this time they waved and cheered. And as before, outriders joined us, but this time they wore our colors as well as the Renselaeuses’. This had all been arranged beforehand, I found out through Nimiar. People expected power to be expressed through visible symbols, such as columns of armed outriders, and fancy carriages drawn by three matched pairs of fast horses, and so forth. Apparently Shevraeth loathed traveling about with such huge entourages--at least as much as Galdran used to love traveling with them--so he arranged for the trappings to be assumed at the last moment. All this she told me as we rattled along the last distance through Remalna-city toward the golden-roofed palace called Athanarel. When we reached the great gates, there were people hanging off them. I turned to look, and a small girl yelled, “Astiar!” as she flung a posy of crimson rosebuds and golden daisies through the open window of our carriage. “They didn’t shout last time,” I said, burying my face in the posy. “Just stared.” “Last time?” Nee asked. “When I had the supreme felicity of being introduced to Galdran by the esteemed Marquis,” I said, striving for a light tone.

Under the cover of darkness, that’s when duels were arranged, to conceal the proceedings that were frowned upon by law; and there was enough time for sobering-up if the challenge was prompted by intemperance brought on by too much drink. This duel though, was preplanned. “. . . that was how a dress sword came to be a part of a gentleman’s formal attire,” Francisco thus concluded his disquisition on duels that had proceeded at sinuous length when the three friends: Rodrigo, Miguel and himself, had gathered in his study to strategize just last Monday. Both parties had agreed to use pistols, not swords which was the weapon of choice up until the end of the last century. “If you can afford one, you can have a bespoke pistol made, Rodrigo,” said Francisco who, as was his wont, had been on a fact-finding mission about duels. These pistols came in cases complete with The Twenty-six Commandments, the code book that laid down the methodus pugnandi, the same book that Miguel had now folded and shoved into his pocket, its pages soft like cloth from much handling – and the damp from the river-mist. He and Francisco shuffled around in the shadows cast by the incipient pre-dawn sun, still unsure of their roles in this debauchery.

Time's Magpies by Stewart Stafford Time’s magpies swoop to taunt and rob, And pluck out hair and gums carefree. Opportunity and energy drained by mob, As we duel pitiless reality. The cat’s jowls swelled in uproar, His gut sags and snarls with pain. Feathery barbs of a matador, Feline fleeing to copse again. A younger cat enters the fight, Ousting the aged tom. Crown prince routs thieving flight, A proud lion of dawn's sun. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Musashi, being the second son of Tahara Iesada, was given up for adoption to Miyamoto (Shinmen) Munisai. In this way, one person at least from the Tahara line would retain samurai status, something that was a matter of pride. It was a logical arrangement considering the tangled strands of the Akamatsu bloodline connecting them all in one way or another.24 Thus, Munisai’s background is as obscure as Musashi’s and most information about him also appears in contradictory texts written long after he died. Many still argue over whether he was a Hirata or a Hirao. Nonetheless, it is evident from what can be pieced together that Munisai was an accomplished martial artist known for his courage in battle. He reputedly took the heads of seven enemy warriors in one battle with a jūmonji-yari (crossed pike). As recorded in the Shinmen-kaki, “When Muni advanced with his yari [lance], seven warriors among the enemy sought to strike Muni down with their yari, but he skillfully took hold of their yari, running down as many as three warriors, taking their heads and giving chase to the remainder, thereby defeating the Kusakari forces.”25 He created a style of swordsmanship utilizing two swords in unison, which he named Tōri-ryū.26 Such was Munisai’s renown in battle that he was invited to demonstrate his skill in front of the last Muromachi-era shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiteru. Pitted against the shogun’s personal instructor, Yoshioka Kenpō, Munisai won two of the three bouts. This impressed the shogun, who then bestowed on Munisai the lofty designation Hinoshita Musō (“Peerless Under the Sun”). It is unknown when Munisai died, but it was most certainly after Musashi’s duel with Kojirō for reasons outlined below. Musashi clearly learned his trade under the wing of a formidable warrior.

Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

Indeed, the zeal of Boston's rank-and-file marathoners rivaled, and in some ways echoed, the religious passion of Nathaniel Howe and his congregation. The runners indulged in orgies of self-denial-running 100 miles a week, working junk )ohs in order to have time to train, paying their own way to races, banding together in ascetic cells, forgoing the temptations of an idolatrous world in order to attain grace and salvation out on the road. As in Puritan New England, grace was not blithely attained. A believer-a runner-earned it by losing toenails and training down to bone and muscle, just as the Puritans formed calluses on their knees from praying. No one made a cent from their strenuous efforts. The running life, like the spiritual life, was its own reward.

We’ve discussed two parallel adaptations to manage the sun’s dueling effects on body chemistry—the evolution of dark skin to protect our stores of folate and the evolution of a genetic trigger for increased cholesterol to maximize production of vitamin D. Both of those adaptations are common in people of African descent and are effective—in the bright, strong sun of equatorial Africa. But what happens when people with those adaptations move to New England, where the sun is much less plentiful and far less strong? Without enough sunlight to penetrate their dark skin and convert the additional cholesterol, they’re doubly vulnerable—not enough vitamin D and too much cholesterol. Sure enough, rickets—the disease caused by a vitamin D deficiency that causes poor bone growth in children—was very common in African American populations until we started routinely fortifying milk with vitamin D in the last century. And there appear to be connections among sunlight, vitamin D, and prostate cancer in African Americans as well. There is growing evidence that vitamin D inhibits the growth of cancerous cells in the prostate and in other areas, including the colon, too. Epidemiologists, who specialize in unlocking the mystery of where, why, and in whom disease occurs, have found that the risk of prostate cancer for black men in America climbs from south to north. When it comes to prostate cancer in black men, the risk is considerably lower in sunny Florida. But as you move north, the rate of prostate cancer in black men climbs until it peaks in the often cloud-covered heights of the Northeast.

Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by human action. No matter how many solar panels I put on my roof to absorb sunlight, they will have no effect on what the sun does tomorrow. But other flows—“critical-zone resources,” in the jargon—can be exploited to exhaustion. Consider an archetypical critical-zone flow: the run of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Drop a net across the watercourse and the fish will swim right into it. As long as the number of fish taken from the river every year doesn’t exceed the number of survivors from that year’s crop of newborns, fishing can continue indefinitely—the supply won’t go down, no matter how many years people put in nets. But leave the net in too long one year and it will take every single salmon and there will be no more fishing after that. Catching the last fish is just as easy as catching the first—laying the net across the stream doesn’t get more costly as the supply diminishes. With critical-zone flows, things typically go fine until they suddenly don’t.

Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun’s energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky to let sunlight flood into rooms during winter, heating cold interiors. Thousands of miles away, Greek savants expounded the same architectural principles to their disciples. So, later, did the Romans, according to the solar-energy chronicler John Perlin, whose work I am drawing upon here. To heat the rooms in public baths, Romans built giant south-facing windows—those in Pompeii’s caldarium were 6′7 x 9″10.

But Mouchot was learning the limitations of solar power. Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock. Mouchot’s engines were useless at night or on cloudy days—and French skies were often cloudy. Even when the sun shone, the mirrors were costly. One skeptical engineer noted in a review of Mouchot’s work that running a typical one-horsepower steam engine required “about two kilograms [4.4 pounds] of coal.” To drive the same engine with the sun, Mouchot would need a mirror of about 320 square feet. Operating factory-scale machinery would require hundreds of giant mirrors—a huge expense. Meanwhile, French industry was not running out of fuel, as so many had predicted it would. Paris had signed a trade agreement with London, and the nation was awash with British coal.

Weaver could say something about the sun, though. In principle, the sun pours onto Earth enough energy—vastly more than enough—to provide all humanity with the necessary 128,000 calories a day. “If solar energy could be utilized with full efficiency, the United States alone could sustain, energy-wise, a population over 40 times the present total population of the planet.” The global population then being about 2 billion, Weaver was suggesting that in terms of energy the theoretical carrying capacity of the United States was about 80 billion people.

becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn’t all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?

Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the price of photovoltaics, has been falling. Renewable-energy enthusiasts imagine great warehouses full of batteries, soaking up excess sun power by day, releasing it by night, keeping the lights on in the dark. But no matter how cheap the batteries are, such facilities will involve constructing a second, parallel infrastructure for energy storage, adjacent to the first, for energy production, a costly step for the foreseeable future. Today, as in Mouchot’s time, free energy from the sun is surprisingly expensive.

Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India’s electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.

Sun power’s image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today’s multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. The first wide-scale use of solar panels had come in the 1960s: powering military satellites, which couldn’t use fossil fuels (too bulky to lift into space) or batteries (impossible to recharge in orbit). By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the industry had acquired only one major new user: the petroleum industry. Some 70 percent of the solar modules sold in the United States were bought to run offshore drilling platforms.

When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimated the cost of silicon panels that could supply electricity for a typical middle-class home at $1.43 million (about $13 million in today’s dollars). It would be cheaper to cover the entire roof in gold leaf. Daunted by the economics, most researchers gave up on photovoltaics until the oil shocks of the 1970s revived peak-oil fears—and hopes that the sun might be the way to escape them. The numbers seemed so overwhelming, so alluring.

As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave—X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third of the total is reflected from clouds. Another sixth is taken in by airborne water vapor. That leaves roughly half of the incoming light—most of which is visible light, as it happens—to pass through the atmosphere. Almost all of that half is absorbed by the land, oceans, and vegetation on the surface. (A little is reflected.) Having taken in all this solar energy, the ground, water, and plants naturally warm up, which makes them emit infrared light, radiating it into the air. Most of this secondary infrared is absorbed by airborne water vapor, heating it up. Usually water vapor comprises between 1 and 4 percent of the atmosphere by weight. (The exact number changes with temperature, wind, and surface conditions.) But this relatively small quantity—1 to 4 percent—packs a big punch.

The gang members never went the same way to or from the cave. This eliminated creating a path that would make their trail easier to follow. While the principle was sound, it was a bad choice in this case.

News was not just the high doings of important persons, but rather the “shreds and patches” of everyday life, a daily record of the city in all its mottled and disorderly splendor.

(In response the Sun asserted that Bennett’s “only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope.”)

In that crucible a new kind of newspaper was born, one that was not merely an organ of the commercial elites, but rather a mass-market medium—politically independent, designed to be read by the average person, and featuring exactly the sort of reporting that continues to mark most newspaper journalism today: crime, scandal, sports, entertainment.

The entertainment lies less in the nature of the attraction (although as Barnum pointed out, a certain amount of “glitter” is essential) than in the implicit competition between patron and promoter, each one seeking to outwit the other in a game of deception and exposure. It was a distinction on which P. T. Barnum would build a career, and it helps to explain the continuing success of the Sun in the aftermath of the moon series.

According to Poe, the hoaxer is the extraordinary, the superior man, for with his hoax he has managed to rise above the foolish, credulous mass of people. (In his account of the Balloon Hoax, Poe refers to them as “the rabble.”) He has achieved his success not by being born into it (an especially sensitive topic for Poe, given how little he received from his wealthy stepfather) or by cultivating friendships with more successful men (Poe was forever railing against the clubbiness of the literary world), but by earning it: his success is a reflection of his own brilliance.

For Poe, no greater intellectual pleasure could be found than in matching wits with a capable adversary. Of course he greatly enjoyed perpetrating his own hoaxes—a diddle would be no diddle, after all, without a grin—but he also loved to expose the hoaxes of others, taking them apart to reveal their inner workings.

they also abjured what they saw as the manipulation and duplicity of the political newspapers, which, they claimed, sacrificed “every principle of freedom” for the short-term gain of whichever party they happened to favor.

Miami, published in 1987.

This meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about 107,000 years ago. The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Clothing has practical uses—warming the body in cold places, shielding it from the sun in hot places—but it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something of inescapable interest to a visually oriented species like Homo sapiens. Clothing is ornament and symbol; it separates human beings from their earlier, unself-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, but only people can be naked.) The arrival of clothing was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human world was becoming a realm of complex, symbolic artifacts.

If the girls wish to romp outdoors instead of sitting in a cheerless house,” Devon said, “I don’t see what harm it would do. In fact, what reason is there to hang black cloth over the windows? Why not take it down and let in the sun?” Kathleen shook her head. “It would be scandalous to remove the mourning cloth so soon.” “Even here?” “Hampshire is hardly at the extremity of civilization, my lord.” “Still, who would object?” “I would. I couldn’t dishonor Theo’s memory that way.” “For God’s sake, he won’t know. It helps no one, including my late cousin, for an entire household to live in gloom. I can’t conceive that he would have wanted it.” “You didn’t know him well enough to judge what he would have wanted,” Kathleen retorted. “And in any case, the rules can’t be set aside.” “What if the rules don’t serve? What if they do more harm than good?” “Just because you don’t understand or agree with something doesn’t mean that it lacks merit.” “Agreed. But you can’t deny that some traditions were invented by idiots.” “I don’t wish to discuss it,” Kathleen said, quickening her step. “Dueling, for example,” Devon continued, easily keeping pace with her. “Human sacrifice. Taking multiple wives--I’m sure you’re sorry we’ve lost that tradition.” “I suppose you’d have ten wives if you could.” “I’d be sufficiently miserable with one. The other nine would be redundant.” She shot him an incredulous glance. “My lord, I am a widow. Have you no understanding of appropriate conversation for a woman in my situation?” Apparently not, judging by his expression. “What does one discuss with widows?” he asked. “No subject that could be considered sad, shocking, or inappropriately humorous.” “That leaves me with nothing to say, then.” “Thank God,” she said fervently, and he grinned.