Quotation from: The Arrow of Gold

Written by: Joseph Conrad

Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the
conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling
inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order. The ears of
all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning. Mrs. Blunt
seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them
and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing
to my inexperience. I looked at her from time to time thinking:
She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two
continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second
Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with
marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her
wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage
unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old:--a sort of Phoenix
free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent
amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the
world. In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul
she had.