Sentence No. 51 · 17 May 2026
Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so beautiful a girl as Constantia Durham.
George Meredith, The Egoist
George Meredith — The Egoist (1879) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The opening phrase "Susceptible to beauty" is an absolute-style adjective phrase modifying the subject — it has no verb of its own, so it can never stand alone as a clause. Whenever you see a short descriptive phrase followed by a comma, the main subject and verb always come after that comma.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 6 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Meredith introduces Sir Willoughby Patterne — a man of such perfect self-regard that the world exists only as his mirror. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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