Payment Deferred quotes

It was a leather case, the parting gift of one of the middle-aged women on the boat.

Women never realize that a leather case spoils cigarettes.

But this was far more than a cigarette case. It was a substantial wallet, with pockets for stamps and visiting cards, and at the back, sagging open in consequence of the way in which Medland held it, was a compartment for money.

… for he had at first imagined that this was merely evidence of a desire to open a credit account with him, and, since Marble’s manner did not indicate this, he came to the other conclusion, that he was about to hear a hard luck story.

As far as Saunders’ experience went, men between themselves did nothing but bet or borrow.

“You do bank with the National County, don’t you?” began Marble.

Saunders agreed.

And the word of a bookmaker is accepted all over England.

“I’ve got some information. It might mean a lot of money if it were used properly.”

But on the other hand it must be admitted that the vague thing known as “Personality” was affecting the case, too. Marble was putting out all his strength to influence Saunders unobtrusively, and he was succeeding.

Men can do much when they have to.

“Well,” said Marble, bleak eyes set like stones, “the franc is going to rise, and now is the time to buy.”

“Here, what are you drinking?” he asked, signalling agitatedly to the barman, and then leaning forward again to go over the details once more. Marble’s cold judgement had chosen his man well.

A bookmaker earns his living by other people’s gambling, but even with this practical example always before him there is no one on earth so ready to gamble⁠—in anything not pertaining to the turf.

Then Saunders made a last despairing effort to writhe out of the business. He said that, after all, he was unacquainted with Marble.

Mr. Marble had a specious plea of justification for having done all this on his own responsibility, in that Henderson had acquiesced in the first expansion of the deal, but he did not think he would have to use it.

No bank really objects to having its clients enriched by the enthusiasm of its staff.

When the letter was finished Mr. Marble slipped out of the office. He had done no work that day, and he would not have been able to even if he had tried.

“I don’t know, but—oh, Will, you can’t have made as much money as all that?”

To children it seems perfectly natural that their father should come home one day and say that he has made all their fortunes; but to a woman nothing seems more unlikely than that the husband should say the same thing.

It took a long time to convince Mrs. Marble. Indeed, by the time that this was done, Mr. Marble had lost all enjoyment. Nobody had been very enthusiastic; nobody had told Mr. Marble what a very wonderful man he was;

For five shillings does not set one thinking of police and prisons. Besides, Mrs. Marble hardly knew what to do with fifty pounds, and lastly she had too great a fear for the future to spend it all at once.

Muddleheaded she may have been, but in her life Mrs. Marble had learned one lesson, and that very thoroughly; it was to the effect that there is nothing as nice as money, nothing that goes so quickly, and nothing that is so hard to obtain.

Mrs. Marble went and locked it into the one private drawer she had in all the house.

In fact, none of her clothes were even clothes in their eyes.

She had realized in a blinding flash that these people mentally divided the world into the clothed and the unclothed, and to them she was on no higher plane than a naked savage.

But she had made up for it.

Yet John could not find any definite beginning to this moroseness and cross-grainedness, for Mr. Marble had drunk more than was good for him and had neglected his wife long before James Medland had made his solitary visit to 53 Malcolm Road.

John looked upon the unpleasing traits in his father’s character as plants of slow growth and poisonous flowering.

All John knew was that there was trouble in the family, terrible trouble, too, and he guessed, childlike, at his father’s hatred for him and resented it with a hatred equally bitter.

It was hardly surprising that during that term John found himself very much to himself, and that his already well-developed taste for being solitary increased under stress of circumstances.

At school he was that most uncomfortable of beings, the old new boy.

The thirteen-year-old at a new school enters a low form, where he finds others of his kind with whom to congregate; he is not expected to know the little points of etiquette that are so vastly important; friends come to him automatically.

Those summer months fled past him like a maelstrom; he was hardly conscious of what was happening around him.

The sweets of life were bitter to his palate, in that they were poisoned by the girding worry that was ever present and ever increasing.

The summer term flashed by. It hardly seemed a week since he had seen Winnie off from Paddington before his wife began to make arrangements for her return. Then she spoke to Mr. Marble about holidays.

Mrs. Marble, apparently, wore indifferently the pastel shade silk underclothes bought in Bond Street and the wool and cotton mixture garments, neither decorative nor useful, which she had had before the arrival of these others. The explanation was really simple.

Never in her life before had Mrs. Marble had any clothes to give away; they were all worn to rags long before she could spare them.

She could not get into the habit of disposing of her older wardrobe. In fact, it is much to be doubted whether she had ever contemplated giving away garments in which there still remained six months’ wear, according to earlier standards of economy.

Madame Collins was a highly successful intriguer, now that she had gained experience and the poise given by experience.

To no one in the suburbs, not even to the milk roundsman, is given the opportunity for gossip which the suburban dressmaker enjoys.

After the costume has been fitted, and changing naturally from the easy and fertile subject of clothes, there comes a time in every interview with every customer when local affairs must be discussed.

He was a very good piano tuner, and highly prized by the firm that employed him. Therein lay the tragedy.

For the perfect piano tuner must never play the piano. If he does, he loses half his worth as a tuner.

His ear loses that shade of anxious accuracy that makes him the perfect tuner. So Collins, thirsty for music, inexpressibly moved by music, spent his life in a piano factory tuning pianos, eternally tuning pianos. No wonder that Marguerite Collins found life drab.

Therein lay the tragedy. For the perfect piano tuner must never play the piano. If he does, he loses half his worth as a tuner. His ear loses that shade of anxious accuracy that makes him the perfect tuner.

So Collins, thirsty for music, inexpressibly moved by music, spent his life in a piano factory tuning pianos, eternally tuning pianos.

No wonder that Marguerite Collins found life drab.

At the end of the evening there would be a passing of a little bundle of money—trust Marble to deal in cheques as little as possible under these circumstances—and Marguerite would slip out as quietly as she came.

They were strange evenings, half dream, half nightmare.

By a queer twist of thought, Marble found that the sharing of his house and of its view of the backyard was oddly comforting when Marguerite was with him.

They were nearly annoyed when they found that Mrs. Marble took it for granted that she was to accompany them; but there was no thought in her mind save just that.

She could not picture a state of affairs in which anyone would sooner be alone with her daughter than have her present as well.

But the men, young and old alike, found that there was one sure way of enjoying Winnie’s society unadulterated; that was to settle Mrs. Marble comfortably on the pier listening to the band, in a deckchair, and then take Winnie for a walk round. Mrs.

John did his best to explain, but he felt from the start it was hopeless.

The intuition proved correct, for Mrs. Marble had no sympathy at all with boredom, never being bored herself.

“I don’t think father will like it if you go home,” said Mrs. Marble. “He’s spent an awful lot on this holiday for you, and you ought to show that you appreciate it.”

There was no effort about it, no call for original thought or talent, and absence of effort was grateful to a man who habitually drank more than he should do, and whose mind was continually wandering down dark avenues, often traversed but always new.

His wife was a nobody now, a phantom less real than the squint-eyed hangman that so often came tapping him on the shoulder; she was a soft-footed ghost that wandered about the house, coping ineffectually with the work that awaited her, and usually weeping, but so quietly that it did not disturb him.

Sometimes Mrs. Marble wept at the memory of her dead son; sometimes she wept because her back hurt her. But she wept at other times, too, and she did not know why she did;

It was a strange, mad life that the two of them led nowadays.

There was money in plenty, and very little use for it.

The walls of the sitting-room were by now completely lined with Mr. Marble’s collection of books on crime; all the other rooms were crowded with massive and incredibly costly furniture, whose elaborate carvings were a source of woe to Mrs.

She was as sweet as honey always to Mrs. Marble. Yet it was not easy to gain Mrs. Marble’s good graces. Anxiety about her husband occupied such of her attention as was not busy working out the problem she had set herself.

And she resented bitterly any display of sympathy, for that might indicate that the sympathizer understood her trouble better than she did herself.

Besides, Mrs. Marble had been “respectably brought up,” in a world where it was a serious social slur to have a drunken husband, and any reference to her husband’s failing had her up in arms at once.

There is no solitude like that which one can find in a London suburb. It is desolate, appalling.

The weeks that passed now found the Marbles lost in this solitude, and over them, like a constant menace, hung the unvoiced menace of a secret shared. The days they spent together in the tawdry rooms downstairs;

Back into this nightmare world came Winnie, flushed with triumphs at school. She was undoubtedly beautiful now, and she was dressed to perfection, as soon as she had thrown off the shackles imposed by school rules.

Her beauty had won over to her one party at school, and her almost unlimited pocket-money had won over another.

Eleven months only younger than her dead brother, she was now just sixteen;

But happily Winnie was not of the stuff that carries things through to the bitter end in face of all opposition.

She was like her father in that she was able to make one big effort which achieved much but left her incapable of more for a considerable time.

Her activity died down, and in a brief time she found herself actually acquiescing in some of Mrs. Marble’s shiftless methods of housekeeping. And in a flash she found that she was incredibly bored.

But it was one thing to decide to make oneself agreeable to one’s wife, and quite another to carry it out. Mr. Marble felt positively embarrassed as he eyed his wife and tried to brace himself for action.

He had lived with her in the closest proximity and yet in the harshest isolation for a year now; it would be a difficult matter to break the ice and start afresh.

Besides, there lay between them the shadow of a terrible secret. That might serve to bind them closer together later on, but at present it was an obstacle almost insurmountable. Not all that day, not that night, not the next day did Mr.

Not one word had passed between them concerning the shade of terrible danger that brooded over them, but now that each knew, and had shown that they could bear with the knowledge, the shade did not seem so black.

It was a trouble shared, and a trouble shared voluntarily is a trouble robbed of half its weight.

Singing, Annie Marble went up and down the stairs. Marble, sitting downstairs, could hear her thin voice and her light step. For the present the voice did not call up a scowl to his brow;

She would flit around the big shops, ordering here, trying on there, with in her manner a little trace of apology for troubling the assistants, for all her money.

For her it was one of the very keenest of enjoyments, so keen that it almost hurt, to buy things, anything she liked, without having to think about the cost.

But always she would stop in the middle of her shopping and hurry anxiously to catch a bus to get home in case her darling Will was growing anxious about her.

The disappointment of the decline of their happiness rasped their nerves, and they displayed a distressing tendency to snap at one another which Winnie deprecated.

It was rank bad form for husband and wife to quarrel in public. Winnie considered that her presence was sufficient to make the quarrels take place “in public.”

Behind the wrinkle in Winnie’s brow many things were slowly developing. She liked to think of herself as cold-blooded and calculating. Calculating she may have been; cold-blooded she certainly was not.

She liked to think of herself as cold-blooded and calculating. Calculating she may have been; cold-blooded she certainly was not. She could weigh up chances, and make a plan of campaign, but she never chose the cautious plan indicated by those chances.

Winnie’s cold-bloodedness amounted to an ability to see the folly of recklessness combined with an inability to avoid being reckless.

First of all she was cautious. She refitted her wardrobe to the fullest extent she could possibly contrive; her father paid the bills without a murmur.

Mrs. Marble only reached the gate when they were fifty yards away—beyond recall.

It was all very stupid and silly, and afterwards it seemed as if it might have been avoided⁠—but it really might not.