1 "You'd have nothing but horses, inkstands, and novels in yours," answered Meg petulantly.
2 In novels, the girls show it by starting and blushing, fainting away, growing thin, and acting like fools.
3 For a small thing it was a great success, and Jo was more astonished than when her novel was commended and condemned all at once.
4 But the novel disaster quenched her courage for a time, for public opinion is a giant which has frightened stouter-hearted Jacks on bigger beanstalks than hers.
5 She was tired of care and confinement, longed for change, and thoughts of her father blended temptingly with the novel charms of camps and hospitals, liberty and fun.
6 He was grave and pale now, and looked decidedly more like the novel heroes whom she admired, but he neither slapped his forehead nor tramped about the room as they did.
7 By-and-by, when you've got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels, said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject.
8 You'll spoil it if you do, for the interest of the story is more in the minds than in the actions of the people, and it will be all a muddle if you don't explain as you go on, said Meg, who firmly believed that this book was the most remarkable novel ever written.
9 Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired.
10 This much-enduring man had succeeded in banishing chewing gum after a long and stormy war, had made a bonfire of the confiscated novels and newspapers, had suppressed a private post office, had forbidden distortions of the face, nicknames, and caricatures, and done all that one man could do to keep half a hundred rebellious girls in order.