Knight of the Old Cart

"Jedi?" came a hiccup of surprise from one of the other pilots. It seemed no matter where she went in the galaxy the word was voiced with the same tone or surprise. Gella focused on that, on the recognition, the weight of it. Nothing as selfish as pride, but bolstered by a sense of rightness she could never truly put into words.

Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold: one of Rindy in jompers and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of Therese with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so bad.

One afternoon, sitting on the terrasse of the Cafe Tortoni, General D’Hubert learned from the conversation of two strangers occupying a table near his own, that General Feraud, included in the batch of superior officers arrested after the second return of the king, was in danger of passing before the Special Commission. Living all his spare moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers, a day in advance of reality, and in a state of bestarred hallucination, it required nothing less than the name of his perpetual antagonist pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon’s generals away from the mental contemplation of his betrothed.

"And indeed he loved all his men with as much affection as a father of a large family can feel for every individual member of it. If human beings, by an oversight of Providence, came into the world as mere civilians, they were born again into a regiment as infants are born into a family, and it was that military birth alone which counted."