Maria laughed and laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.
Maria was a very amiable figure in this short story and she laughed quite a lot. It would be easy to explore the context of her laughs, with the aid of Ngrams technique.It would also be funny to find all the quaint features of Maria: her tiny little body, her way of laughing, etc.
THE grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur.
This paragraph was an exquisite work to invoke the readers' memories for such a grey warm evening of August. Whether it be coincidence or not, I think in this tiny section Joyce had packed a sense of circulation, a memory. For instance, in the last sentence, there was the recurring of 'unceasing', the lamp's shape and hue changed unceasingly, in turn, the evening air was endowed with the unceasing murmur. And there was the mention of 'grey warm evening' , or 'warm air', altogether 3 times. Interestingly, Joyce slightly varied the expressions of trigrams, the first time as 'grey warm evening', the second as 'mild warm air', the third as 'warm grey evening'. This variation itself created a touch of circulation.
She stopped suddenly as if to listen
I am interested in phrases like this. "as if to" is an interesting way of describing an action, especially when it IS the action taking place. We could extract all of the ngrams beginning with "as if to" to see what types of actions are occurring and then do a close reading to see if that is what they ARE doing.
on the stage
Katherine is adept at those trigrams that remind the readers of the theme of her stories. The ideal family was regarded by outsiders as an exemplar as if they were on the stage, and even in their own house, in their private times, the voice of their daughter was so histrionic as if she were on the stage.
in the new way
A couple of times did the 'new' s appeared. Seemingly , Isabel had picked up a new way of living when she took her friend's advice and moved to the new house. In her reflection in her bedroom, the adjectives used were all negative, indicating a not-so-charming turn in her character. She had done everything in the new way: new house, new servants, new friends. And those that stood most intimate to her in the past were stifled in her heart, and her new self was jeering at them, and, by the few lines in the last two paragraph, no doubt William was among those. A search for 4-gram 'in the new way' or other synonyms of 'new' might reveal something.
persistent gnawing
A recurring element in the story is the persistent gnawing of William. Could look for bigrams 'persistent gnawing'. What exactly is the cause of the painful gnawing in his breast? His marriage to Isabel seemed empty and he hadn't the remotest notion what Isabel's life was like when he was not around. Is their marriage a dead one?
caring for the smell of lavender.
Even this early in the narrative there have a variety of plants and characters introduced (almost like a garden of characters as well as plants). I would be interested in doing a comparison of the variety of characters mentioned, including those mentioned only by description compared with the plants. We perform a word frequency analysis and also look for Ngrams.