How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"[…] You're so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don't know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really is— unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making." (31.81)
Ellen called her previous life with the corrupt Count as "looking at the Gorgon." With the Count Ellen observed some of the horrible things people do. Archer seems to suggest that their love affair can't be as bad as all the awful things she witnessed in her previous life, and that it is worth sacrificing duty for love.
Quote #8
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind, Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp […] a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault. (33.43)
Archer finds it difficult to sacrifice his love when he feels all of his social duties keep him a prisoner.
Quote #9
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. (34.26)
Twenty-six years later, an older Archer seems to have accepted the fact that he is an old-fashioned creature of duty who would never leave his wife. It doesn’t matter how much he loved another woman.