Diverging Roads quotes

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever. The epic had ended in bad verse.

Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like an old man sitting in the sun with his memories.

And youth, taking up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther unknown trails and different adventure.

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever.

The epic had ended in bad verse.

Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like an old man sitting in the sun with his memories. And youth, taking up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther unknown trails and different adventure.

There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years.

It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy.

“I don’t see why!” she flashed. “A girl like me has to work if she’s going to get anywhere. I bet I could do as well as a boy if I had a chance.”

The words were like a defensive armor between her and her real desire.

She did not want to work. She wanted to be soft and pretty, tempting and teasing and sweet. She wanted to win the things she desired by tears and smiles and coaxing. But she did not know how.

She did not do it very well, but Helen saw her sometimes in the evenings working at it. She swept with quick, feverish strokes. Her yellow hair straggled over her face; her high heels clicked on the floor; her petticoats made a whisking sound.

There was something piteous about her, as there is about a little trained animal on the stage, set to do tasks for which it is not fitted.

Helen stole down the hallway at night, taking the broom from its corner as if she was committing a theft, and surreptitiously swept and dusted her own room, so that Mrs. Brown would not have to do it.

She had to have a job, she just had to have a job; it didn’t matter how much it paid, anything. She felt that she could not walk out of that office.

She clung to the edge of the counter as if she were drowning and it were a lifeline.

“Well—come in. I’ll see what you can do,” he said. He swung open a door in the counter, and she followed him between the tables. There was a dusty instrument on a battered desk, back by the big switchboard.

“I wish to God you’d mind your own business!” Mrs. Brown cried after them.

“If you’d only tend to your own affairs, you good people!”

She hurled the words after them like a curse, her voice breaking with sobs. The door slammed under Mrs. Campbell’s angry hand.

His keen look at her suddenly made clear a fact for which she had been unconsciously groping while she watched these men and women, the clue to their relations.

Beneath their gaiety a ceaseless game was being played, man against woman, and every word and glance was a move in that game, the basis of which was enmity.

He thought that she, too, was playing it, and against him.

She crowded into the tonneau during their quick, restless dashes from one dancing place to the next. She laughed a great deal, and when they met Duddy and Bob somewhere a little after midnight she danced with each of them.

But she felt that having a good time was almost as hard work as earning a living.

It was nearly two weeks before she went out again with momma and Louise, and this time she did not see him at all. Louise was astonished by his failure to telephone.

For nearly three years her whole life had been work. Those few evenings at the cafés had been her only gaiety. She had copied innumerable market quotations, sent uncounted messages, been a mere machine, and for what?

She did not want to work, she wanted to live.

That night she went to the beach with the crowd. Bob was there and Duddy and a score of others she had met in cafés.

When, flushing, he said again that he would get her a ring, she answered that she did not want one, and they said no more about it.

The abyss between them was left bridged only by the things they had not said, fearing to make it forever impassable by saying them.

He left her at her door promptly at the proper hour of ten. There was a moment in which a blind feeling in her reached out to him;

“Not on your life! We’re going to have the biggest party this town ever saw!” he answered exultantly over his shoulder, and she saw his enjoyment of the bomb he was about to drop upon the unsuspecting group at the table.

“The roof is off the sky tonight. This is a wedding-party!”

Louise and momma were upon her with excited cries and kisses, and Helen, flushed, laughing, trying not to be hysterical, heard his voice ordering drinks, disposing of questions of license, minister, ring, rooms at the St. Francis, champagne, supper, flowers.

Louise and momma were upon her with excited cries and kisses, and Helen, flushed, laughing, trying not to be hysterical, heard his voice ordering drinks, disposing of questions of license, minister, ring, rooms at the St. Francis, champagne, supper, flowers.

She was the beggar maid listening to King Cophetua.

She had learned that men loved women for being beautiful, gay, unexacting, sweet-tempered always, docile without being bores.

She had learned that men were infuriated by three things; questions, babies, and a woman who was ill.

She had learned that success in business depended upon “putting up a front” and that a woman’s part was to help in that without asking why or for what end.

“Oh, stunning!” she agreed, keeping her eyes clear and smiling. She would not fall into the error and the confession of being catty. But she felt that he perceived her motive, and she knew that in any case he held the advantage over her.

She was in the helpless position of the one who gives the greater love.

They sipped their coffee in silence broken only by the crackling of the newspaper. Then, pushing it away, he set down his cup and leaned back against the pillows, his hands behind his head.

… the corners with the sixth sense of the city dweller, seeing without perceiving them the clanging streetcars, the silent, shining limousines, the streams of cleverly dressed women, preoccupied men, fluffy dogs on chains, and the panorama of shopwindows filled with laces, jewels, gowns, furs, hats.

She walked surrounded by an isolation as complete as if she were alone in a forest, and nothing struck through it until she paused before a window-display of hardware.

She came to that window frequently, drawn by an irresistible attraction. With a pleasant sense of dissipation she stood before it, gazing at glittering bathroom fixtures, rank on rank of shining pans, rows of kitchen utensils, electric flatirons.

“I’m awfully glad to hear it. Your mother’s well?”

The situation was fantastic and ghastly, but she would not escape from it until she could do so gracefully.

She formed the next question in her mind while he answered that one.

She told herself that she did not want Paul to be still in love with her and unhappy, but there was a pleasure in seeing this evidence that his agitation was greater than hers.

Being ashamed of the emotion did not kill it.

He told her, with an attempt to control his pride, that he was no longer with the railroad company. The man who “just about owned Ripley” had given him a better job.

She stopped at another watering-trough, and in the house beside it a faded woman, keeping the screen door hooked between them, told her that the Limited was four miles farther on. It did not occur to her to ask anything more.

Her mind was set, like an alarm clock, for the Limited.

She drove into it at last. It was like a small part of a city, hacked off and set freakishly in a hollow of the sand hills. A dozen huge factory buildings faced a row of two-story bunkhouses.

She saw that the sun was shining, and as she walked through the crowded, familiar streets, passing flower-stands gay with color, feeling the cool breeze on her face, and seeing white clouds sailing over Twin Peaks, she felt that the bright day was mocking her.

She understood why most suicides occur on days of sunshine.

Her life was beginning again, in a new way, among strange surroundings. She thought that it would be pleasant to be dead.

Here was the quaint, walnut desk she had found at a secondhand store, and the big, mannish chair with the brown leather cushions. It was all hers, her very own. She had made it. She was at home, and free.

The silence around her was like cool water on a hot face.

In the white-tiled bathroom, with its yellow curtains, yellow bath rug, yellow-bordered fluffy bath-towels, she washed the last memory of the office from her. She reveled in the daintiness of sheer, hand-embroidered underwear, in the crispness of the white dress she slipped over her head.

“Oh, I won’t mind if it does happen,” she said quickly. “In a way, I’d be glad. I’d be out of business anyway; I’d find something else to do.

Nobody knows how I hate business⁠—nothing but an exploiting of stupid people by people just a little less stupid.

”

For the moment her tenderness enfolded him, who loved her so much, so much that she could never give him enough to repay him.

It came to her in a clear flash of thought through one of their silences that the maternal quality in a woman’s love is not so much due to the mother in the woman as to the child in the man.

He had to go at last. The morning train for Ripley, but he would write her every day. “And you’ll see—about it—right away?”

And now I’m climbing up again. Oh, if I had it to do over again, I—” He changed the words on his lips—“I’d do the same thing. No doubt about it. We all think we wouldn’t, but we would.

We don’t make our lives. They make us.

”

The house seemed strange, with early-afternoon sunlight streaming through the living-room windows. It was delightfully silent and empty.

Long hours, weeks, months, stretched before her like blank pages on which she might write anything she chose.

She went through the rooms, straightening a picture, moving a chair, taking up a vase of withering flowers. The curtains stirred in a cool breeze that poured through the open windows and ruffled her hair. It seemed to blow through her thoughts, too;

She might meet an acquaintance, a woman who lived near her, and over ices elaborately disguised with syrups and nuts they could talk of the movies, the weather, the stupidities of servants.

Time had become an adversary to be destroyed as pleasantly as possible.

In the long, lazy afternoons she sat on a neighboring porch, listening to talk about details, magnified, distorted, handled over and over again, and while her fingers were busy at an embroidery hoop, stitching bits of thread back and forth through bits of cloth, her …

She had felt the same thing in entering her office when all the salesmen were there. Some intangible current of sympathy was cut, an alien element introduced. One thought before speaking, as if to a stranger who did not perfectly comprehend the language.

“There is a subtle division between men and women,” she thought

, talking brightly to Paul while they climbed Tamalpais together or wandered in Golden Gate park. “Each of us has his own world.”

“We’ll always have love. Every one of us has someone around in the background, sending us flowers.

A woman without a man who loves her feels like a promissory note without an endorsement.

But marriage!”