Life
To the question of what life is, the narrator arrives with an answer in metaphor. "Life with most people is little more than a succession of high and low tides." This opening line to a chapter opens the floodgates to a philosophical expansion upon the point. The assertion is given nuance and detail just in case anyone is not able to make the connections between tides and life cycles.
Grief
The story opens with the death of the title character's mother while the daughter is still just a teen. She has returned home to help her father with his grief, but things are not going smoothly. "Though he gave a little sigh at the sight of his wife's sofa, he did not hesitate to sit down upon it, and even to draw it a little out of its position, which, as Lucilla described afterwards, was like a knife going into her heart." The simile here remains as is. The reader is given no more direct assertion. It is context alone which will guide readers to a judgment on the precise meaning of the wound to the heart related to the treatment of the sofa.
Mr. Cavendish
The character of Mr. Cavendish is most intensely illuminated by one singular use of metaphor and simile joined together. "He went to his room, accordingly, like a martyr, carrying all his difficulties with him." This portrait of a man burdened with problems who gains some sort of perverse pleasure from the weight of the burden itself provides far greater insight into him than entire paragraphs afford other characters.
Pretty
The title character is described as being somewhat less than beautiful. One man, however, see things quite differently. He sees a "little dewy face, full of clouds and sunshine, uncertain, unquiet, open-eyed, with the red lips apart, and the eyes clear and expanded with recent tears— a face which gave a certain sentiment of freshness and fragrance to the atmosphere like the quiet after a storm." Or, in other words, as he thinks to himself, she is very pretty.
The Frenzied Archdeacon
Our heroine learns that "the Archdeacon had passed like a Berserker through those ranks which were not the ranks of his enemies." Although moder readers are almost certainly familiar with the term berserk, it stems from a very specific allusion. The simile compares the man of the church to a Norse warrior infamous for a frenzied style of fighting his enemies.
