1 Nothing else in the world is of any consequence.
2 There was no one thing in the world that she desired.
3 The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.
4 The acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world.
5 The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath.
6 But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.
7 There was a Miss Mayblunt, no longer in her teens, who looked at the world through lorgnettes and with the keenest interest.
8 Mrs. Highcamp was a worldly but unaffected, intelligent, slim, tall blonde woman in the forties, with an indifferent manner and blue eyes that stared.
9 And the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world.
10 The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.
11 That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
12 In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.
13 As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.