A Hazard of New Fortunes quotes

“What you want to do is to get out of the insurance business, anyway. You acknowledge that yourself. You never liked it, and now it makes you sick; in other words, it’s killing you.

You ain’t an insurance man by nature. You’re a natural-born literary man, and you’ve been going against the grain.

Now, I offer you a chance to go with the grain. I don’t say you’re going to make your everlasting fortune, but I’ll give you a living salary, and if the thing succeeds you’ll share in its success. We’ll all share in its success.

“But I don’t understand why you’ve set your mind on me,” March said. “I haven’t had any magazine experience, you know that; and I haven’t seriously attempted to do anything in literature since I was married.

I gave up smoking and the Muse together.

I suppose I could still manage a cigar, but I don’t believe I could—”

You ought to have accepted on the spot. You might have known I would approve, and you could so easily have taken it back if I didn’t. Telegraph him now! Run right out with the despatch—Or we can send Tom!”

In these imperatives of Mrs. March’s there was always much of the conditional. She meant that he should do what she said, if it were entirely right; and she never meant to be considered as having urged him.

“And suppose his enterprise went wrong?” her husband suggested.

His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he had renounced; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together.

That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but she knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; and he, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her.

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said that it compensated the opposite in her character. “

I suppose that’s one of the chief uses of marriage; people supplement one another, and form a pretty fair sort of human being together.

The only drawback to the theory is that unmarried people seem each as complete and whole as a married pair.”

They could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he called a private hall, and in the drawing-room and the succession of chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen.

Everything had been done by the architect to save space, and everything to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor Green.

She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning round in each room, and had folding-beds in the chambers, but there her subordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that you would knock it …

“Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallness and not the dearness?”

“No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that’s a great deal.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and so high up. But what prices! Now, we must be very circumspect about the next place.”

Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And the whole city is so,” said March, “or else the L would never have got built here.

New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or pauper, it’s gay always.

”

“Yes, gay is the word,” she admitted, with a sigh. “But frantic. I can’t get used to it.

They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.

”

Why, those tenements are better and humaner than those flats! There the whole family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the family consciousness.

It’s confinement without coziness; it’s cluttered without being snug.

You couldn’t keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar to get cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-American flat, not because it’s humble, but because it’s false.”

but the flat abolishes the family consciousness. It’s confinement without coziness; it’s cluttered without being snug. You couldn’t keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar to get cider.

No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-American flat, not because it’s humble, but because it’s false.

”

They have to take what they can get. But people like us—that is, of our means—do give character to the average flat. It’s made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it’s made for social show, not for family life at all.

Think of a baby in a flat! It’s a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood.

The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It’s made to give artificial people a society basis on a little money—too much money, of course, for what they get.

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from themselves.

Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning in these;

“Also!” The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp. He laughed at himself.

“I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I gafe it to your gountry a goodt while ago.”

“To my country?” asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as if it were a joke of the old man’s. “Your country, too, Lindau?”

The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly,

“What gountry hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?”

“Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us rich men, Lindau,” March returned, still humoring the joke.

he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his desires.

He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.

“I don’t know,” said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel together, “but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty daughter to take part of their house here.”

Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: “Yes, harm.

You’ve kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant’s notice ever since we came, and what good has it done?

I’m going to keep on hoping to the bitter end. That’s what papa did.”

But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if it did not deserve it.

She was one of those people who believe that if you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen. She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.

“If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma,” she answered, “I don’t know where we should have been now.”

you make some pictures, and Ah’ll wrahte a book fo’ them. Ah’ve got to do something. Ah maght as well wrahte a book. You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But Ah don’t mand it.

I tell papa I shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’ if it wasn’t fo’ the inconvenience.

”

“Mah, yes!

Perhaps that’s one reason why poo’ people have to woak so hawd⁠—to keep their mands off their poverty.

”

“She doesn’t know any more about art,” said Alma, “than—nothing at all. But she’s jolly and good-hearted. She praised everything that was bad in my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself.

When a person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know where they belong artistically.

”

Above all, there was a sculptor’s revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have more than one.

But they are apparently immensely interested as well as distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to a certain point, with anyone who said literature was his proper expression;

One lady said she valued his coming when he said he would come because it had the charm of the unexpected. “Only it shows that it isn’t always the unexpected that happens,” she explained.

It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not realize that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him.

While we are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect. It seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel. Later we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late;

While we are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect. It seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel.

Later we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late; some of us never find it out at all.

In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address. As a matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr.

“How do I know?

She isn’t the kind that bends; she’s the kind that breaks.

”

“Is it snowing outdo’s?” she asked, briskly, after the greetings were transacted. “Mah goodness!” she said, in answer to his apparent surprise at the question. “

Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all the winter Ah have seen in New York yet.

”

“Oh, mah goodness!” cried Miss Woodburn. “Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah? Well, Ah’m glad Ah’m not an awtust—unless I could do all the talking.”

“Artists cannot tell a fib,” Alma said, “or even act one,”

and she laughed in Beaton’s upturned face.

“The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society,” the Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were presented. “

The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of creating.

”

Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her. “

Bad manners? He has no manners! That is, when he’s himself. He has pretty good ones when he’s somebody else.

”

They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her husband what a divvy was.

“It’s a chicken before it’s hatched.”

He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.

“Well, I can understand that,” said Fulkerson. “

The impulse to destroy Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against at the start.

”

Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. “

You can easily get over caring for people; but you can’t get over liking them⁠—if you like them because they are sweet and good.

That’s what lasts. I was a simple goose, and he imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose. Now the case is reversed.”

Alma laughed. “

Because⁠—because I’m wedded to my Art, and I’m not going to commit bigamy, whatever I do.

”

“

The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,

” said Fulkerson, hardily, “and I like to keep my hand in with a little practise on the trumpet in private. I don’t believe Mr. Dryfoos has got any idea of the extent of this thing.

“Can you prove that?” His father turned sharply upon him. “

Whatever is won is lost. It’s all a game; it don’t make any difference what you bet on.

Business is business, and a businessman takes his risks with his eyes open.”

He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t have reached his mental makeup.

He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity.

That’s the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.”

“I reckon he don’t know everything,” the old woman persisted: “I’ve been runnin’ down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn’t feel any too well there, even.

It’s a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git, the less you ain’t able to stay where you want to, dead or alive.

”

and there’s no end to the luck; it pours in. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don’t know which way to move; I don’t know what’s best to do about anything.

The money don’t seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble.

We got a big house that we ain’t at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round under our feet that hinder and don’t help. Our children don’t mind us, and we got no friends or neighbors. But it had to be.

and she spoke impartially, too. “I don’t believe that the literary men and the artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you know, was very plebeian; her husband was a businessman of some sort.”

“He would have been a howling swell in New York,” said Beaton, still impartially.

Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he looked like a monk in evening dress.

They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh.

“Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we left yonder really belong to the same system of things? How impossible each makes the other seem!”

they were perfectly natural—like born aristocrats. And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy—titles, and arms, and ancestors—it won’t falter from any inherent question of its worth.

Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is anything it hasn’t got, it believes it can buy it.

”

“Had you? This is a surprise.”

“Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens.”

“True; I keep the world fresh, that way.”

“Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens.”

“True; I keep the world fresh, that way.”

“It wouldn’t have been any change to go from one city to another for the summer. We might as well have stayed in New York.”

His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, “And what is the next thing?” he threw himself forward, and repeated: “Yes, sir! What is the next thing?”

“Natural gas, by thunder!” shouted Fulkerson.

One of the waiters had profited by Lindau’s posture to lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar.

“Why, of course, March,” said Fulkerson, coaxingly, “I mean to do the right thing. But Dryfoos owns the magazine—”

“He doesn’t own me,” said March, rising.

“He has made the little mistake of speaking to me as if he did;

How hot you are! and in a drip of perspiration! Now you’ll be sick.” She took his hat away, which hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender impatience. “What is the matter? Has anything happened?”

“Everything has happened,” he said

, getting his voice after one or two husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by prolonged cross-questioning.

“Well, men awe splendid,” sighed the girl. “Ah will say it.”

“Oh, they’re not so much better than women,” said Fulkerson, with a nervous jocosity.

“I guess March would have backed down if it hadn’t been for his wife.

“Not when you put on that wind-harp stop.”

“Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them.”

“He’s made some very pretty ones about you.”

“It would be the best thing for both of you,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of desperation. “I don’t think New York is any place for girls.”

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela, “is, it don’t seem to be any place for young men, either.”

She found this so good when she had said it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.

he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.

To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will

; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.

and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction in the businesslike despatch of all the details which attends each step in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most sorely stricken.

We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these.

Fulkerson was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought not to have experienced.

“Oh, death doesn’t look bad,” said March. “It’s life that looks so in its presence.

Death is peace and pardon.

I only wish poor old Lindau was as well out of it as Conrad there.”

We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more wouldn’t avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have lived sordidly to no purpose.

Someone always has you by the throat, unless you have someone else in your grip.

I wonder if that’s the attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward one another! I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight in, the game we trick in!

“Oh, without doubt! We can’t put it all on the conditions; we must put some of the blame on character.

But conditions make character; and people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life.

We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at all; but if someone ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a fraud and a crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poorhouse.