Short Fiction quotes

Wisely. Don’t let her kid you!

Experience is the biggest gold brick in the world. All older people have it for sale.

I like him. We talk literature.

Well, you’ve got to play his game.

When in Rome do as the Romans would like to do.

But I’m through with books. I’m all educated.

You’re very inconsistent—last summer you read every day.

If I were consistent I’d still be living on warm milk out of a bottle.

Yes, and probably my bottle. But I like Mr. Calkins.

Sentimentally.

It’s so nice talking to you like this⁠—when you’re merely a voice. I’m rather glad I can’t see you.

What color are you wearing?

You are mysterious. I love you.

You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

You’re a historian. Tell me if there are any bathtubs in history. I think they’ve been frightfully neglected.

Marcia was nineteen.

She didn’t have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn’t need them.

She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Outside of that she was no better than most women.

Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures.

When he talked you forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time.

“What do you want?” he asked.

She was so stuck on herself that she could never say ‘sixteen’ without putting the ‘only’ before it. We got to calling her ‘Only Jessie.’ And she’s just where she was when she started—only worse.

‘Only’ is a bad habit, Omar⁠—it sounds like an alibi.

”

“I know,” agreed Marcia, nodding—“your name’s Horace.

I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette.

”

“Why, yes,” admitted Marcia, unruffled. “

’At’s all life is. Just going round kissing people.

”

“

I hate these slot-machine people.

”

“

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

”

Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper’s Gymnasium he felt a placid wonder, quite unmixed with humor, at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at himself a year before! How everyone would have gaped!

But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.

The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.

“I wish I could,” breathed Marcia. “

If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love-letter in the world⁠—and never get tired.

”

But life hadn’t come that way.

Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings.

He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia’s threatened kiss.

He was getting a little bald just on top of his head. She wondered if that was from wearing a hat so much.

It seemed awful for a man to grow bald and no one to care about it.

“Were you—pious when you were young, Kieth?” she asked. “You know what I mean. Were you religious? If you don’t mind these personal questions.”

He kept telling me I meant a sort of soppy softness, but I knew I didn’t—yet I didn’t know exactly how to put it. I see now. I meant just the opposite.

I suppose real sweetness is a sort of hardness⁠—and strength.

”

“No,” said Kieth earnestly, “I’m not sure that knocking about gives a man the sort of experience he can communicate to others.

Some of the broadest men I’ve known have been absolutely rigid about themselves. And reformed libertines are a notoriously intolerant class.

Don’t you think so, Lois?”

Comstock. Lord, it used to make me shiver. She said it comforted her, poor old mother. No, I don’t think that to help others you’ve got to show yourself at all.

Real help comes from a stronger person whom you respect. And their sympathy is all the bigger because it’s impersonal.

”

“

You can’t shock a monk. He’s a professional shock-absorber.

”

“It’s a piker organization. My Gosh! Lookit what they give me. I’m quittin’ in a coupla months. Hell! Me stay with this bunch!”

The Charley Moores are always going to change jobs next month.

They do, once or twice in their careers, after which they sit around comparing their last job with the present one, to the infinite disparagement of the latter.

It didn’t matter what he did—just so he got out of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the stockroom, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box, covering his face with his hands.

His brain was whirring with the frightful jar of discovering a platitude for himself.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” he said aloud and then repeated, “I’ve got to get out”—and he didn’t mean only out of Macy’s wholesale house.

Yet, however Dalyrimple justified himself intellectually, he had many bad moments in the weeks immediately following his decision. The tremendous pressure of sentiment and inherited ambition kept raising riot with his attitude.

He felt morally lonely.

The noon after his first venture he ate in a little lunchroom with Charley Moore and, watching him unspread the paper, waited for a remark about the holdup of the day before. But either the holdup was not mentioned or Charley wasn’t interested.

Between the lines on patrol, even when alone, he had had behind him the moral support of half a billion people; now he was alone, pitted against that same moral pressure—a bandit.

He had never felt this fear, yet he had never felt this exultation.

The stairs came to an end, a doorway approached; he went in and listened to regular breathing.

Then for reassurance he had to go back to think out the whole thing over again. He found that it was on the whole better to give up considering himself as a rebel.

It was more consoling to think of everyone else as a fool.

His attitude toward Mr. Macy underwent a change. He no longer felt a dim animosity and inferiority in his presence. As his fourth month in the store ended he found himself regarding his employer in a manner that was almost fraternal.

“Those things,” answered Mr. Fraser, “are mechanical.

Linotype is a resuscitator of reputations.

Wait till you see the Herald, beginning next week—that is if you’re with us—that is,” and his voice hardened slightly, “if you haven’t got too many ideas yourself about how things ought to be run.”

Peter, of course, has his chin on his palm like the pictures of the young Sir Walter Raleigh. He has a complete set of features, including serious, sombre, even funereal, gray eyes—and radiates that alluring air of never having eaten food.

This air can best be radiated during the afterglow of a beef dinner.

He is looking at Mr. Icky, fascinated.

Considering. I shouldn’t think you’d object to a nice quiet old clergyman’s set.

Clergymen haven’t got glands⁠—they have souls.

There is a low, sonorous honking off stage to indicate that a large motorcar has stopped in the immediate vicinity. Then a young man handsomely attired in a dress-suit and a patent-leather silk hat comes onto the stage. He is very mundane.

Gloomily. Fair.

After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when everyone is.

Be careful. … I will not marry my daughter to an epigram. …

Be careful. …

I will not marry my daughter to an epigram.

…

No … no. …

We never forgive those we can understand.⁠ ⁠… We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all.

…

Back to the soil, yes! I’ve been trying to turn my back to the soil for ten years!

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

Struggling with himself. I must be quaint. That’s all there is. It’s not life that counts, it’s the quaintness you bring to it. …

Struggling with himself. I must be quaint. That’s all there is.

It’s not life that counts, it’s the quaintness you bring to it.⁠ ⁠…

We’re going to slide down the Riviera. We’ve got tickets for Piccadilly Circus. Life! Jazz!

Baker Brothers, New York, pause on their semiannual trip through the West to clothe him; Montmorency & Co. dispatch a young man posthaste every three months to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his shoes.

He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if he lives long enough, and doubtless a Chinese tank if it comes into fashion.

He looks like the advertisement of the young man rubbing his sunset-colored chest with liniment and goes East every other year to his class reunion.

So he presented himself, his heart, his license, and his ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements.

It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it’s all been a mistake.

Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely and assure the other person it was all their fault. Say it all was my fault! Say it was! I want to hear you say it!

“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently. “They don’t put wood alcohol in champagne. This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old.

It’s so ancient that the cork is petrified. You have to pull it with a stone drill.

”

Now when a man says “closed, closed” like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one—warm and inspiring.

Think of all the fine men we should lose if suicide were not so cowardly!

An hour later was six o’clock, and Perry had lost all resemblance to the young man in the liniment advertisement. He looked like a rough draft for a riotous cartoon. They were singing—an impromptu song of Baily’s improvisation:

“Me? Sure I’m goin’.

Never miss a party. Good for the nerves⁠—like celery.

”

“Hm,” said Perry. An idea struck him suddenly. “

If you’ve got a piece of canvas I could go’s a tent.

”

It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.

It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence.

No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus be represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer’s dance orchestra.

“If you need it, old man,” he said hoarsely.

No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance unfortunate.

Perhaps boys prefer her company to that of the butterflies with whom they dance a dozen times an but, youth in this jazz-nourished generation is temperamentally restless, and the idea of foxtrotting more than one full fox trot with the same girl is distasteful, not …

There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Having decided this, Marjorie said good night. When she came out into the hall it was quite empty.

“All right—I’ll just give you a few examples now. First you have no ease of manner. Why? Because you’re never sure about your personal appearance. When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm.

The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have.

”

“But I thought,” interrupted Bernice in bewilderment, “that you despised little dainty feminine things like that.”

“I hate dainty minds,” answered Marjorie.

“But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”

“Do you believe in bobbed hair?” asked G. Reece in the same undertone.

“I think it’s unmoral,” affirmed Bernice gravely. “But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ’em or shock ’em.”

Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde. It was greeted with a ripple of laughter from the men and a series of quick, intent looks from the girls.

“Then why you gettin’ engaged to a Yankee?”

“Clark, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but⁠—well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

“Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here and Ben Arrot, and you-all, but you’ll—you’ll—”

They waited impatiently for the three bent figures to move off, and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.

Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the end of day.

“You’ll be up about mid-January,” he said, “and you’ve got to stay a month at least. It’ll be slick. There’s a winter carnival on, and if you’ve never really seen snow it’ll be like fairyland to you.

“You certainly won’t. You may freeze your nose, but you won’t be shivery cold. It’s hard and dry, you know.”

“I guess I’m a summer child. I don’t like any cold I’ve ever seen.”

She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.

“I saw you look out the window a minute ago—and shiver.”

“Just my imagination,” laughed Sally Carroll “I’m used to havin’ everythin’ quiet outside an’ sometimes I look out an’ see a flurry of snow an’ it’s just as if somethin’ dead was movin’.”

“Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina.”

“But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know—Spanish señoritas, black hair and daggers an’ haunting music.”

“No, the Northern races are the tragic races⁠—they don’t indulge in the cheering luxury of tears.”

Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn’t depress her.

“I know. I’m the sort of person who wants to be taken care of after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be.”

“Shall we dance? You know,” he continued as they rose, “it’s encouraging to find a girl who knows what she’s marrying for. Nine-tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture sunset.”

She laughed and liked him immensely.

Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five oppressed her.

Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair.

“Come on, dear,” said Harry.

It was magnificent, it was tremendous!

To Sally Carol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar to the gray pagan God of Snow.

As the shout died the band struck up again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating cheers by each club. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato cries rent the stillness;

She called again, but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations. Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this time following a wide passage.

It was like the green lane between the parted water of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.

She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed on the bottom of her overshoes; she had to run her gloves along the half-slippery, half-sticky walls to keep her balance.

She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from icebound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure.

It was an icy breath of death; it was rolling down low across the land to clutch at her.

With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started blindly down the darkness. She must get out.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes.

From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half …

Too full of words and rage to speak, Mr. Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, ran swiftly down the ladder.

Five o’clock rolled down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea.

The golden collar widened into a glittering island; and a faint breeze that had been playing with the edges of the awning and swaying one of the dangling blue slippers became suddenly freighted with song.

“Why?” he demanded cynically. “Going to write a movie, about me?”

“Go on,” she urged. “Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper.

He couldn’t put his heart into it any more. The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild.

He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child, eating his ice-cream so slowly that he couldn’t taste it at all.

He wanted to have a lot of money and time and opportunity to read and play, and the sort of men and women round him that he could never have—the kind who, if they thought of him at all, would have considered him rather contemptible;

… and the great silence were increasing until he could almost hear the midnight toilet of the mermaids as they combed their silver dripping curls under the moon and gossiped to each other of the fine wrecks they lived in on the green opalescent avenues below.

“You see,” said Carlyle softly, “this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding⁠—it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”

He turned to her, but she was silent.

“Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?”

“Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase⁠—‘I love you.’ ”

Carlyle laughed and sat down.

“It’s the sort of remark,” he said gravely, “that’s typical of your class.”

“Oh,” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t start that lecture on aristocracy again! I distrust people who can be intense at this hour in the morning. It’s a mild form of insanity⁠—a sort of breakfast-food jag. Morning’s the time to sleep, swim, and be careless.”

Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to approach the island from the north.

Her voice floated up to him again.

“And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life⁠—not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.”

She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back appeared on his level.

And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.

Time, having no axe to grind, showered down upon them three days of afternoons.

When the sun cleared the porthole of Ardita’s cabin an hour after dawn she rose cheerily, donned her bathing-suit, and went up on deck.

“I thought you weren’t afraid.”

“I never am⁠—but I won’t throw my life away just to show one man I’m not.”

“I wish you’d been poor. Just a little poor girl dreaming over a fence in a warm cow country.”

And then dawn slanted dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray corners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading.

For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life⁠—then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat and the swish of oars.

Suddenly against the golden furnace low in the east their two graceful figures melted into one, and he was kissing her spoiled young mouth.

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age.

In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wineglasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases—for, though …

He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never reproach her nor allude to it in any form; and he told himself that this was rather a big way of looking at it—that she was not a little impressed.

Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.

He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.

There was a bright glamour of moonlight diffusing on the sidewalks and lawns, and with a little half yawn, half laugh, she remembered one long moonlight affair of her youth.

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.

There was the problem of Julie—Julie was thirteen, and lately she was growing more and more sensitive about her deformity and preferred to stay always in her room reading.

Gilly was thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the September day when Mr. Meredith’s valet stowed Samuel’s clothing in the best bureau and asked, on departing, “hif there was hanything helse, Master Samuel?” Gilly cried out that the faculty had played him false.

He felt like an irate frog in whose bowl has been put goldfish.

“Good gosh!” he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries, “he’s a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, ‘Are the crowd here gentlemen?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re boys,’ and he said age didn’t matter, and I said, ‘Who said it did?’

At first he simply admitted that his wrongness had made him powerless—as it had made him powerless against Gilly—but eventually his mistake about the workman influenced his entire attitude.

Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel’s code remained but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter.

Within that year his class had somehow stopped referring to him as a snob.

For the next week Samuel was in a nervous turmoil.

Some persistently rational strain warned him that at bottom he and Marjorie had little in common, but in such cases there is usually so much mud in the water that one can seldom see to the bottom.

Every dream and desire told him that he loved Marjorie, wanted her, had to have her.

“Do you fellows love Wall Street?” he said hoarsely, “or wherever you do your dirty scheming—” He paused. “I suppose you do.

No critter gets so low that he doesn’t sort of love the place he’s worked, where he’s sweated out the best he’s had in him.

”

The next ten minutes were perhaps the hardest of his life.

People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid corpse seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.

Samuel thought mostly of his family, yet he never really wavered. That jolt had brought him to.

He broke with the Carhart interests in July, and in August Samuel Meredith, at thirty-five years old, was, to all intents, made Carhart’s partner. The fourth fist had done its work.

I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook.

With some men it’s secret and we never know it’s there until they strike us in the dark one night. But Samuel’s showed when it was in action, and the sight of it made people see red.

Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street swarmed with the noon crowd.

The wealthy, happy sun glittered in transient gold through the thick windows of the smart shops, lighting upon mesh bags and purses and strings of pearls in gray velvet cases; upon gaudy feather fans of many colors; upon the laces and silks of expensive dresses; upon the bad paintings and the fine period furniture in the elaborate show rooms of interior decorators.

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man’s silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed.

upon gaudy feather fans of many colors; upon the laces and silks of expensive dresses; upon the bad paintings and the fine period furniture in the elaborate show rooms of interior decorators.

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man’s silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed.

They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their platinum wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans and opera cloaks;

She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening.

All evenings were her evenings.

Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate with a hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented himself before her and bowed unusually low. It was the man she had come with, Peter Himmel.

“Just that. I was always queer—little bit different from other boys. All right in college, but now it’s all wrong.

Things have been snapping inside me for four months like little hooks on a dress, and it’s about to come off when a few more hooks go.

I’m very gradually going loony.”

“Shall we dance?” she suggested, coolly.

Love is fragile⁠—she was thinking⁠—but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tendernesses learned, are treasured up for the next lover.

Peter Himmel, escort to the lovely Edith, was unaccustomed to being snubbed; having been snubbed, he was hurt and embarrassed, and ashamed of himself.

At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which glittering cobwebs formed.

Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged themselves in trim formation and at his curt wish of dismissal, marched off and disappeared.

And with the departure of worry came brilliant, permeating symbolism. Edith became a flighty, negligible girl, not to be worried over; rather to be laughed at. She fitted like a figure of his own dream into the surface world forming about him.

“Just a crowd,” said Henry, abstractedly. “

All crowds have to howl.

They didn’t have anybody with much initiative in the lead, or they’d probably have forced their way in here and smashed things up.”

The great plate-glass front had turned to a deep blue, the color of a Maxfield Parrish moonlight—a blue that seemed to press close upon the pane as if to crowd its way into the restaurant.

Dawn had come up in Columbus Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhouetting the great statue of the immortal Christopher, and mingling in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric light inside.

Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer’s credit list.

But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer.

“Jelly-bean” is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular⁠—I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.

Jim was born in a white house on a green corner. It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of latticework in the rear that made a cheerful crisscross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn.

Passing, he ambled on toward the garage where he had a room upstairs. His “How y’all” had been said to Nancy Lamar, to whom he had not spoken in fifteen years.

Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes and blue-black hair inherited from her mother who had been born in Budapest.

Jim passed her often on the street, walking small-boy fashion with her hands in her pockets and he knew that with her inseparable Sally Carrol Hopper she had left a trail of broken hearts from Atlanta to New Orleans.

The man laughed too and Jim experienced the quick pang of a weird new kind of pain. Some ray had passed between the pair, a shaft of beauty from that sun that had warmed him a moment since.

The Jelly-bean felt suddenly like a weed in a shadow.

A minute later Clark approached him, bright-eyed and glowing.

But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered.

All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a tired forehead.

Down in Georgia there is a feeling—perhaps inarticulate—that this is the greatest wisdom of the South—so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes—the ones …

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible.

Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

Yet had Jeffrey Curtain kept at scrivening for twoscore years he could not have put a quirk into one of his stories weirder than the quirk that came into his own life.

Then he lay down on the couch like a child, weeping piteously and begging to die. A blood clot the size of a marble had broken his brain.

There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed.

It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror—that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very …

Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black, opened the door. Her hair was yellow, heightened, Roxanne imagined, by a dash of peroxide in the rinsing water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen blue—she was pretty and too consciously graceful.

Her cordiality was strident and intimate, hostility melted so quickly to hospitality that it seemed they were both merely in the face and voice⁠—never touching nor touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.

But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her eyes were caught and held in uncanny fascination by the wrapper. It was vilely unclean. From its lowest hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue dust of the floor;

“

I can love what it once was. What else is there for me to do?

”

He was devoted to her. He made no pretense of hiding, no attempt to deepen, this relation. She was his best friend as the mass of flesh on the bed there had been his best friend.

She was peace, she was rest; she was the past.

Of his own tragedy she alone knew.

It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild hills rose on all sides.

Swift mountain streams flowed rapidly up and down the mountains.

Jemina Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing whiskey at the family still.

The man was amused.

He laughed a light tinkling laugh, the laugh of a Philadelphian.

Something in the ring of it thrilled her. She drank off another dipper of whiskey.

Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one like him had ever come into her life before.

She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She counted eleven.

She had learned arithmetic in the mountain school.

She sat upon her hands and watched him.

He was wonderful. When he talked his lips moved.

She sat upon the stove and watched him.

Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived with some older lady and was possibly nineteen.

She was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening.

She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest, about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south side of Central Park.

nor did he even marry her. A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and it is this strange thing that will presently be set down here. It began one October afternoon when she walked briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge.

A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows—it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of skyscrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray …

I mean you can swallow the flat part easy enough or else the other part—that is, separately—but for a whole collar button you’d have to have a specially made throat.” He was astonishing himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his remarks.

Words seemed for the first time in his life to run at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs.

“That’s what scared me,” she said. “I knew you had to have a specially made throat—and I knew, at least I felt sure, that you didn’t have one.”

“It’s the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. “The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around.

To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.

”

“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand.

Understanding is allowed to us old people⁠—after nothing much matters.

I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a tabletop you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in antebellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy.

This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies⁠—Mr. Button was naturally nervous.

He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of “Cuff.”

… boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles—he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father.

Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.

When his grandfather’s initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that gentleman took enormous pleasure in one another’s company.

One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins’ country house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening.

A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless colour of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter.

The open country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of the sky—almost.

“I like men of your age,” Hildegarde told him. “

Young boys are so idiotic.

They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women.”

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal—with an effort he choked back the impulse. “You’re just the romantic age,” she continued—“fifty.

Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is⁠—oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age.

I love fifty.”

He became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland.

But the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation.

However, everyone agreed with General Moncrief that it was “criminal” for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr.

St. Midas’s School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motorcar.

The actual distance will never be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no one ever will again.

St. Midas’s is the most expensive and the most exclusive boys’ preparatory school in the world.

“

The richer a fella is, the better I like him.

” There was a look of passionate frankness upon his dark face. “I visited the Schnlitzer-Murphys last Easter. Vivian Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big as hen’s eggs, and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside them—”

“That’s nothing.” Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. “That’s nothing at all.

My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

”

“That’s nothing.” Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. “That’s nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky.

An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and forgotten.

He was enjoying himself as much as he was able.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future⁠—flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

John rounded a soft corner where the massed rosebushes filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees.

“Because I wouldn’t mind if I were,” she persisted, “but I’m not. I’m very innocent and girlish. I never smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry.

I dress very simply⁠—in fact, I scarcely dress at all.

I think sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way.”

“How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded toward you?

You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.

”

She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunderstood.

Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.

The afternoon drifted away. That night, when a last breath of music drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had decided to be married as soon as possible.

That was all. The wind died along the tall grasses of the valley. The dawn and the day resumed their place in a time, and the risen sun sent hot waves of yellow mist that made its path bright before it.

The leaves laughed in the sun, and their laughter shook until each bough was like a girl’s school in fairyland.

God had refused to accept the bribe.

“It was a dream,” said John quietly. “

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

”

Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.” He shivered. “Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night’s full of chill and you’ll get pneumonia.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.

Let us lose it for a few hours.”

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear⁠—the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island⁠—and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter’s skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course.

… as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear—the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island—and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter’s skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course.

At these times the country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy—it offended him that the links should lie in enforced fallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for the long season.

It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sandboxes knee-deep in crusted ice.

When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless glare.

In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into Black Bear Lake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory, the cold was gone.

But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves.

Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it⁠—and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges.

It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole that this story deals.

Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon.

Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet.

Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard.

Succeeding Dexter’s first exhilaration came restlessness and dissatisfaction.

The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate rather than tonic.

It was fortunate for his work during the winter that those moments of ecstasy came infrequently.

Already he was playing with the idea of going East to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him.

No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability.

Remember that—for only in the light of it can what he did for her be understood.

He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife.

Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep.

For a week, lest he imagined her husky voice over the telephone or her eyes opposite him at lunch, he worked hard and late, and at night he went to his office and plotted out his years.

May one year back had been marked by Judy’s poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence—it had been one of those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him.

That old penny’s worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content.

He knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming teacups, a voice calling to children … fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons … …

He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.

“I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?”

Her moist eyes tore at his stability—her mouth turned slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: “I’d like to marry you if you’ll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I’m not worth having, but I’ll be so beautiful for you, Dexter.”

They found a seat near the front of the car.

It was late February and an eager, unpunctilious sun was turning the scrawny street snow into dirty, cheerful rivulets that echoed in the gutters.

Because of this the car was less full than usual—there was no one standing. The motorman had even opened his window and a yellow breeze was blowing the late breath of winter from the car.

Jaqueline broke off and then turned to him with a curious light in her eyes. The words in which she couched her summary of the situation were probably the most disagreeable that had ever been addressed to him in his life.

“The trouble with you, Jim, the reason you’re such an easy mark, is that you’ve got the ideas of a college freshman⁠—you’re a professional nice fellow.”

The incident and the unpleasantness were forgotten. Mather’s vast good nature had smoothed over the roughness within an hour. References to it fell with a dying cadence throughout several days—then ceased and tumbled into the limbo of oblivion.

The incident and the unpleasantness were forgotten. Mather’s vast good nature had smoothed over the roughness within an hour. References to it fell with a dying cadence throughout several days—then ceased and tumbled into the limbo of oblivion.

I say “limbo,” for oblivion is, unfortunately, never quite oblivious.

The subject was drowned out by the fact that Jaqueline with her customary spirit and coolness began the long, arduous, uphill business of bearing a child. Her natural traits and prejudices became intensified and she was less inclined to let things pass.

April afternoon, and all the city shopping on Washington Street. Jaqueline walked slowly past the shops, brooding without fear or depression on the shape into which her life was now being arbitrarily forced.

Dry summer dust was in the wind; the sun bounded cheerily from the plate-glass windows and made radiant gasoline rainbows where automobile drippings had formed pools on the street.

Jaqueline stopped. Not six feet from her a bright new sport roadster was parked at the curb.

“Sorry, Jim,” he answered stiffly,

“I’ve made a rule never to make a personal loan to anybody on any conditions. I’ve seen it break up too many friendships.”

Mather had come out of his abstraction now, and the monosyllable held an undisguised quality of shock. Then his natural tact acted automatically, springing to his aid and dictating his words though his brain was suddenly numb.

The sidewalks were scratched with brittle leaves, and the bad little boy next door froze his tongue to the iron mailbox.

Snow before night, sure. Autumn was over. This, of course, raised the coal question and the Christmas question; but Roger Halsey, standing on his own front porch, assured the dead suburban sky that he hadn’t time for worrying about the weather.

They kissed—lingered over it some moments.

They had been married three years, and they were much more in love than that implies.

It was seldom that they hated each other with that violent hate of which only young couples are capable, for Roger was still actively sensitive to her beauty.

“I like it,” said Tompkins with satisfaction.

“I did it to please myself, and I succeeded.”

Roger stared moodily around the stiff, plain room, wondering if they could have blundered into the kitchen by mistake.

Daily now his layouts arrived from the printers until seven of them were piled and docketed in his office safe. He knew how good they were. Money alone couldn’t buy such work; more than he realized himself, it had been a labor of love.

December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar.

There was an agonizing week when he had to give up coffee because it made his heart pound so. If he could hold on now for four days—three days—

“I have to,” he said with sudden irritation.

“Well, at least I’m not a piece of bric-a-brac that you can just put somewhere and forget.”

He knelt down by her quickly, and took her arms in his hands.

The question startled him.

Like all those who habitually and instinctively lie, he had an enormous respect and awe for the truth.

Something almost exterior to himself dictated a quick, hurt answer.

… now for a while as he strutted homeward along the staggering road, but when the road braced itself in macadam in order to become the main street of Ludwig, Rudolph’s exhilaration faded out and his mind cooled, and he felt the horror of his lie.

God, of course, already knew of it⁠—but Rudolph reserved a corner of his mind where he was safe from God, where he prepared the subterfuges with which he often tricked God.

Hiding now in this corner he considered how he could best avoid the consequences of his misstatement.

Hitherto such phenomena as “crazy” ambitions and petty shames and fears had been but private reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously that his private reservations were himself—and all the rest a garnished front and a conventional flag.

The pressure of his environment had driven him into the lonely secret road of adolescence.

He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt up—when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the seat—and tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge.

Then Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar voice:

“When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering.”

Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz’s face.

All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed.

There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.

He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud.

At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest.

No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred miles.

But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of the crowd.

But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of the crowd.

The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths, and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely anyone saw anyone else but only their own reflection on the sky.

George O’Kelly, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought that all outdoors was horrible.

He was in a mess, one of those terrific messes which are ordinary incidents in the life of the poor, which follow poverty like birds of prey.

The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, somehow, in a way the poor have⁠—but George O’Kelly was so new to poverty that had anyone denied the uniqueness of his case he would have been astounded.

Less than two years ago he had been graduated with honors from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had taken a position with a firm of construction engineers in southern Tennessee.

This was true—when he had first come to the city there had been already a dozen boys around her, responding to her picturesque fragility with adolescent worship, and a few of them perceiving that her beautiful eyes were also sane and kind.

“Do you expect me never to go anywhere”⁠—Jonquil demanded, leaning back against the sofa-pillows until she seemed to look at him from many miles away⁠—“and just fold my hands and sit still⁠—forever?”

“What do you mean?” he blurted out in a panic. “Do you mean you think I’ll never have enough money to marry you?”

It seemed to him that he was being very cool and logical and that she was putting him deliberately in the wrong.

With every word they were drawing farther and farther apart⁠—and he was unable to stop himself or to keep worry and pain out of his voice.

But in a minute Jonquil began to cry sorrowfully and he came back to the sofa and put his arm around her.

The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that it had assumed a strange unreality.

There was nothing changed⁠—only everything was changed.

It was smaller and it seemed shabbier than before—there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the doorbell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil would be down in a moment.

He would never be so weak or so tired and miserable and poor. Yet he knew that that boy of fifteen months before had had something, a trust, a warmth that was gone forever. The sensible thing—they had done the sensible thing.

He had traded his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair.

But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love.

Yet he knew that that boy of fifteen months before had had something, a trust, a warmth that was gone forever. The sensible thing—they had done the sensible thing. He had traded his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair.

But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love.

“You won’t marry me, will you?” he said quietly.

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over.

There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

When John Andros felt old he found solace in the thought of life continuing through his child.

The dark trumpets of oblivion were less loud at the patter of his child’s feet or at the sound of his child’s voice babbling mad non sequiturs to him over the telephone.

The latter incident occurred every afternoon at three when his wife called the office from the country, and he came to look forward to it as one of the vivid minutes of his day.

Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities.

But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn.

“No.” Amanthis shook her head sadly.

“I’m too good-looking. To be a New York society girl you have to have a long nose and projecting teeth and dress like the actresses did three years ago.”

Jim began to tap his foot rhythmically on the porch and in a moment Amanthis discovered that she was unconsciously doing the same thing.

They were now at the south end of the village and Amanthis saw a row of cars parked in front of a two-story building. The cars were all low, long, rakish and of a brilliant hue.

They were the sort of car that is manufactured to solve the millionaire’s problem on his son’s eighteenth birthday.

Then Amanthis was ascending a narrow stairs to the second story. Here, painted on a door from which came the sounds of music and laughter were the words:

His was the position of a golf professional who, though he may fraternize, and even command, on the links, loses his privileges with the sundown.

He may look in the club window but he cannot dance.

And, likewise, it was not given to Jim to see his teachings put into effect. He could hear the gossip of the morning after—that was all.

After breakfast a measure of his customary lightheartedness returned. He was a child of the South—brooding was alien to his nature.

He could conjure up an injury only a certain number of times before it faded into the great vacancy of the past.

But when, from force of habit, he strolled over to his defunct establishment, already as obsolete as Snorkey’s late sanitarium, melancholy again dwelt in his heart. Hugo was there, a specter of despair, deep in the lugubrious blues amidst his master’s broken hopes.

In a taxicab, carefully selected to look like a private car, he drove to Amanthis’s boardinghouse.

She came down wearing a rose-colored evening dress into which the orchids melted like colors into a sunset.

“I reckon we’ll go to the Casino Hotel,” he suggested, “unless you got some other place—”

… the Prince’s favorite labels to paste on their champagne, and the jewelers put incredibly gorgeous articles aside to show to him—but not to the princess—and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that the Prince might beg orthodox forgiveness for his sins.

Even the Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine color in the spring evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered exquisitely offshore.

In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit of him and his family.

And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a jumble of impressions and emotions, of curious phrases that sprang to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were here, were lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all.

Perhaps its very vagueness preserved it in his heart and made him forever unable to forget.

There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring—his father’s loves, for instance, which were many and indiscreet, and which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing the gossip of servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother unexpectedly one afternoon, to …

“I’ve been thinking of mistakes.” They sat down side by side in two canvas deck chairs. “

It’s a most engrossing subject⁠—the subject of mistakes.

Women very seldom brood about mistakes—they’re much more willing to forget than men are. But when they do brood—”

“

Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.

”

Somehow he had never had time for love—the war, the revolution and now his poverty had conspired against his expectant heart. The springs of his emotion which had first poured forth one April night had dried up immediately and only a faint trickle remained.

His happy youth had ended almost before it began.

He saw himself growing older and more shabby, and living always more and more in the memories of his gorgeous boyhood.

At five o’clock the sombre egg-shaped room at the Ritz ripens to a subtle melody⁠—the light clat-clat of one lump, two lumps, into the cup, and the ding of the shining teapots and cream-pots as they kiss elegantly in transit upon a silver tray.

There are those who cherish that amber hour above all other hours, for now the pale, pleasant toil of the lilies who inhabit the Ritz is over—the singing decorative part of the day remains.

When she had made this confession, Luella breathed quickly and looked closely at her friend. She didn’t really feel unnatural at all. This was the truth.

There couldn’t be anything vicious in the truth.

“It may be because you don’t love Charles,” ventured Mrs. Karr, unmoved.

“Don’t you see I’ve had enough of home?” Her breasts seemed to struggle for air under her dress. “Don’t you see how bored I am with keeping house, with the baby—everything seems as if it’s going on forever and ever?

I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.

”

“

You’re trying to leave yourself behind, but you can’t. The more you try to run away from yourself, the more you’ll have yourself with you.

”

“

Things will warm themselves from you.

”

You’ve got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share.

The light and glitter of the world is in your hands.

”

“If there is any light and warmth in it, it will be your light and warmth; if it is happy, it will be because you’ve made it so. Happy things may come to you in life, but you must never go seeking them any more.

It is your turn to make the fire.

”

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created⁠—nothing.

That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing.

That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.

When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal—and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding …

… have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves—such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality.

Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairyland.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairyland.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

Anson accepted without reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege.

Most of our lives end as a compromise⁠—it was as a compromise that his life began.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized hysteria of the war.

Those who did—and there were many—bored her after a brief encounter, but for her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her heart. When she met them she would always try once more—sometimes she succeeded, more often she failed.

It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was a certain resemblance in those who refused to love her⁠—they shared a hard intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness of emotion but a weakness of rudder.

Anson perceived this when he first met her, less than a month after Paula’s marriage. He was drinking rather heavily, and he pretended for a week that he was falling in love with her.

There was something repetitive about it—why, Paula and Dolly had belonged to different generations.

He had a foretaste of the sensation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old flame has married.

He wired congratulations and, as was not the case with Paula, they were sincere—he had never really hoped that Paula would be happy.

His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort of aid to anyone who asked it.

What had been done at first through pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion.

And there was always something—a younger brother in trouble at New Haven, a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a position to be found for this man, an investment for that.

He did not see this clearly—he still felt that there was a norm, a standard of society.

But there was no norm, it was doubtful if there had ever been a true norm in New York.

The few who still paid and fought to enter a particular set succeeded only to find that as a society it scarcely functioned—or, what was more alarming, that the Bohemia from which they fled sat above them at table.

And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the inroads that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friendships.

Groups of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve and disappear.

The men from his own college—and it was upon them he had expended the most time and affection—were the most elusive of all.

At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone⁠—the private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when the solitude is enforced.

There were always women of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never occurred to him—he would have considered that that was something shameful and secret, the diversion …

… the red tam, and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self that I knew, and with which I felt at home.

I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something.

What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

She came slowly down the gangway. Her hat, an expensive, inscrutable experiment, was crushed under her arm, so that her scant boy’s hair, convict’s hair, tried unsuccessfully to toss and flop a little in the harbor wind.

Her face was like seven o’clock on a wedding morning save where she had slipped a preposterous monocle into an eye of clear childish blue.

At every few steps her long lashes would tilt out the monocle, and she would laugh, a bored, happy laugh, and replace the supercilious spectacle in the other eye.

“Where to?” demanded Rags with scorn. “Do you think I still thrill at a nightclub and a bottle of sugary mousseaux?

I prefer my own gaudy dreams.

”

A negro girl, thin as a reed, emerged suddenly from a masked entrance into a circle of harsh barbaric light, startled the music to a wild minor, and commenced to sing a rhythmic, tragic song.

The pipe of her body broke abruptly and she began a slow incessant step, without progress and without hope, like the failure of a savage insufficient dream.

She had lost Papa Jack, she cried over and over with a hysterical monotony at once despairing and unreconciled.

In despair that concealed not a little relief, he bought a plantation in Florida and spent five years turning it into a golf course. When the land boom came in 1924 he sold his real estate for eight hundred thousand dollars.

Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them.

His apathy was neither fear of life nor was it an affectation; it was the racial violence grown tired. It was a humorous apathy.

He liked mankind that night under the summer moonshine of the Borghese Gardens.

The moon was a radiant egg, smooth and bright as Jenny Delehanty’s face across the table; a salt wind blew in over the big estates collecting flower scents from their gardens and bearing them to the roadhouse lawn.

The waiters hopped here and there like pixies through the hot night, their black backs disappearing into the gloom, their white shirt fronts gleaming startlingly out of an unfamiliar patch of darkness.

“I don’t know. I guess I was young. You never know how you once felt, do you?”

She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.

She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.

“Listen, Jake,” she said suddenly. “That lawyer my sister had—that Scharnhorst—called up the studio this afternoon.”

She had bewitchment suddenly in the twinkle of short hairs on her neck, in the sure, clear confidence that at about eighteen begins to deepen and sing in attractive American girls.

The lamp light shopped in the yellow strands of her hair.

Already she was sliding into another world—the world of Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart waiting for us now in the car. In another year she would pass beyond me forever.

Jim’s girl was ready and impatient, but after what had happened her impatience didn’t seem important. She looked lovely though.

That’s one thing about Christmas vacation⁠—the excitement of growth and change and adventure in foreign parts transforming the people you’ve known all your life.

Joe Jelke was polite to her in a daze—he indulged in one burst of short, loud, harsh laughter by way of conversation—and we drove to the hotel.

After a while I saw Joe Jelke sitting in a corner with a strip of court-plaster on his forehead watching Ellen as if she herself had struck him down, but I didn’t go up to him.

I felt queer myself⁠—like I feel when I wake up after sleeping through an afternoon, strange and portentous, as if something had gone on in the interval that changed the values of everything and that I didn’t see.

The night slipped on through successive phases of cardboard horns, amateur tableaux and flashlights for the morning papers.

I was conscious that the lights of Chicago, then of Englewood and of endless suburbs, were moving by, and then there were no more lights and we were out on the dark flatness of Illinois.

The train seemed to draw in upon itself; it took on an air of being alone.

The porter knocked at the door and asked if he could make up the berth, but I said no and he went away.

he even considered leaving college. For, with his decision to play, Dolly assumed a moral responsibility, personal to him, besides. To lose or to let down, or to be let down, was simply intolerable to him. It offended his Scotch sense of waste.

Why sweat blood for an hour with only defeat at the end?

Perhaps the worst of it was that he wasn’t really a star player. No team in the country could have spared using him, but he could do no spectacular thing superlatively well, neither run, pass nor kick.

Jack Devlin and Dolly Harlan of Princeton and somebody—I forget who—from Yale were all about the same distance from it. What Dolly did in that split second was all instinct; it presented no problem to him.

He was a natural athlete and in a crisis his nervous system thought for him.

He might have raced the two others for the ball; instead, he took out the Yale man with savage precision while Devlin scooped up the ball and ran ten yards for a touchdown.

“Well, then, let’s call it a cat.”

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis⁠—a molding of the confusion of life into form.

Josephine stopped in front of the New Amsterdam Theater, where her chauffeur met us and took the car.

She was even prettier than she had been before, softer, externally at least, and a tremendous success.

People passing her on the street jerked their heads quickly to look at her⁠—a frightened look, as if they realized that they had almost missed something.

She was temporarily tired of European men, she told me, letting me gather that there had been some sort of unfortunate love affair. She was coming out in Washington next fall.

It was an hour of thaw, with spring voices in the warm wind, and wherever there was light enough you could see drops glistening and falling.

You could feel the cold melting out of the stars and the bare trees and shrubbery toward Stony Brook turning lush in the darkness.

They were sitting together on a wicker bench, full of themselves and romantic and happy.

“It’s my stuff, don’t you understand, Vienna?

People have got to do their stuff.

”

“Let’s not go over all that. I’m tired of talking, Vienna; I’m tired of my own voice.

It seems to me that no one I know does anything but talk any more.

”

Our class—those of us who cared—would go out from Princeton without the taste of final defeat. The symbol stood—such as it was; the banners blew proudly in the wind.

All that is childish? Find us something to fill the niche of victory.

I waited for Dolly outside the dressing rooms until almost everyone had come out; then, as he still lingered, I went in. Someone had given him a little brandy, and since he never drank much, it was swimming in his head.

On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their knees marked by the red stains of the mercurochrome era, played with toys with a purpose—beams that taught engineering, soldiers that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood.

When the dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for them.

Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.

She was the daughter of a senator from a Western state and she hunted unsuccessfully for glamour through a small Western city until she was seventeen, when she ran away from home and went on the stage.

She was one of those people who are famous far beyond their actual achievement.

There was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect the excitement of the world.

Just before dawn Kay came to him in the garden. There was a river that flowed past it now, and boats faintly lit with green and yellow lights moved slowly, remotely by.

A gentle starlight fell like rain upon the dark, sleeping face of the world, upon the black mysterious bosoms of the trees, the tranquil gleaming water and the farther shore.

The grass was damp, and Kay came to him on hurried feet; her thin slippers were drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes, nestling close to him, and held up her face as one shows a book open at a page.

“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “

I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.

”

“Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.” Her tears were falling. “

I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.

”

“I don’t want to go away.”

She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with every minute. The things on her dressing-table were the property of a stranger.

He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. “If you’re still thinking about Helen Avery, it’s nonsense. I’ve never given a damn for anybody but you.”

From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.

His fault was that he had felt safe too soon.

He realized suddenly that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate.

“No, I know.

You can’t control charm. It’s simply got to be used.

You’ve got to keep your hand in if you have it, and go through life attaching people to you that you don’t want. I don’t blame you. If you only hadn’t kissed me the night of the Mayfair dance. I suppose it was the champagne.”

“You can’t imagine what it’s been like,” Margaret continued after a minute. “

Things you’ve just said and forgotten, I’ve put myself asleep night after night remembering⁠—trying to squeeze something more out of them.

After that night you took me to the Mayfair other men didn’t exist for me any more. And there were others, you know—lots of them.

but at that time she believed that her children’s relation to her was as much as hers had been to her parents, for this was more than twenty years ago.

Some generations are close to those that succeed them; between others the gap is infinite and unbridgeable.

Mrs. Buckner—a woman of character, a member of Society in a large Middle-Western city—carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother;

“I like you better than anybody,” he said deliriously.

The weight of the pink dappled sky above him was not endurable.

He was plunging along through air of ineffable loveliness while warm freshets sprang up in his blood and he turned them, and with them his whole life, like a stream toward this girl.

The weight of the pink dappled sky above him was not endurable.

He was plunging along through air of ineffable loveliness while warm freshets sprang up in his blood and he turned them, and with them his whole life, like a stream toward this girl.

They reached the carriage door at the side of her house.

Gloom settled upon Basil, and through the heavy dusk the figure of Imogene began to take on a new, unattainable charm.

He was a romantic boy and already he had endowed her heavily from his fancy.

Now he hated her for her indifference, but he must perversely linger near in the vain hope of recovering the penny of ecstasy so wantonly expended this afternoon.

Gloom settled upon Basil, and through the heavy dusk the figure of Imogene began to take on a new, unattainable charm. He was a romantic boy and already he had endowed her heavily from his fancy.

Now he hated her for her indifference, but he must perversely linger near in the vain hope of recovering the penny of ecstasy so wantonly expended this afternoon.

He tried to talk to Margaret with decoy animation, but Margaret was not responsive. Already a voice had gone up in the darkness calling in a child. Panic seized upon him; the blessed hour of summer evening was almost over.

But the change of weather had swept over his heart and he leaped up every few steps, swallowing the rain and crying “Yo‑o‑o!” aloud, as if he himself were a part of the fresh, violent disturbance of the night.

Imogene was gone, washed out like the day’s dust on the sidewalk.

Her beauty would come back into his mind in brighter weather, but here in the storm he was alone with himself.

A sense of extraordinary power welled up in him, until to leave the ground permanently with one of his wild leaps would not have surprised him.

He was a lone wolf, secret and untamed; a night prowler, demoniac and free.

Only when he reached his own house did his emotion begin to turn, speculatively and almost without passion, against Hubert Blair.

It had been decided to put Hubert into a garbage can, and though he had nothing at all against Hubert, the idea had made a pattern on his brain which he intended to follow.

He was a natural man⁠—that is to say, a hunter⁠—and once a creature took on the aspect of a quarry, he would pursue it without qualms until it stopped struggling.

But he had been witness to Basil’s inexplicable flight, and supposing that Hubert’s father had appeared and was now directly behind him, he, too, faced about and made off down the alley.

He shook his head somewhat puzzled. Then his thoughts glided back restfully to Hubert’s courage and presence of mind.

Hubert, meanwhile, having exhausted his facts, was making tentative leaps into the realms of imagination.

“I said, ‘So you’re the guy that’s been sending these warnings,’ and he swung his left at me, and I dodged and swung my right back at him. I guess I must have landed, because he gave a yell and ran. Gosh, he could run!

Basil greeted this offer with relief.

The evening had been a mad success, but furies once aroused sometimes get out of hand.

He did not feel like walking the streets alone tonight.

Blair, beckoned Hubert back into the library. Instantly attuned to adversity, Basil listened. There was a whisper and a short scuffle, followed by an indiscreet but unmistakable sound. With the corners of his mouth falling, Basil went out the door.

He had stacked the cards dexterously, but Life had played a trump from its sleeve at the last.

A moment later they all started off, clinging together in a group, turning corners with cautious glances behind and ahead.

And after another week he found that he no longer grieved over losing Imogene. Meeting her, he saw only the familiar little girl he had always known.

The ecstatic moment of that afternoon had been a premature birth, an emotion left over from an already fleeting spring.

He did not know that he had frightened Mrs. Blair out of town and that because of him a special policeman walked a placid beat for many a night.

He bent double with laughter and the girl joined in.

The words “little boy” had fallen on Basil like a jet of cold water. In his excitement he had forgotten something, as a cripple might forget his limp only to discover it when he began to run.

“You think you’re so big!” he exclaimed. “Where’d you get the pants? Where’d you get the pants?” He tried to work this up with gusto and was about to add: “They’re your father’s pants,” when he remembered that Riply’s father, like his own, was dead.

But the boat had already disappeared into the dark mouth of the tunnel, leaving the echo of Riply’s taunting laughter behind.

It is an ancient tradition that all boys are obsessed with the idea of being grown.

This is because they occasionally give voice to their impatience with the restraints of youth, while those great stretches of time when they are more than content to be boys find expression in action and not in words.

They would ride off in Blatz Wildcats into the moonlight without Basil having kissed them. No, all his life—though he would lose the clerk his position: “You see now what your act did to me”—he would look back with infinite regret upon that irretrievable hour.

Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.

He reached home; the package had not arrived. He moped dismally about the house, consenting at half-past six to sit silently at dinner with his mother, his elbows on the table.

His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon his companion with boredom and impatience.

The two had nothing in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong friendship of their fathers⁠—which is less than nothing.

Also they were bound from the same Middle-Western city for Basil’s first and Lewis’s second year at the same Eastern school.

“I don’t like football. I don’t like to go out and get a crack in the eye.”

Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his timidities as common sense.

Basil’s answer, made with what he considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates lifelong enmities.

Doctor Bacon was at his desk.

He was a handsome, redheaded Episcopal clergyman of fifty whose original real interest in boys was now tempered by the flustered cynicism which is the fate of all headmasters and settles on them like green mould.

There were certain preliminaries before Basil was asked to sit down—gold-rimmed glasses had to be hoisted up from nowhere by a black cord and fixed on Basil to be sure that he was not an impostor;

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the nonchalant, debonair, blasé New Yorkers at neighbouring tables, investing them with a romance by which these possible fellow citizens of his from the Middle West lost nothing.

School had fallen from him like a burden; it was no more than an unheeded clamour, faint and far away.

He even delayed opening the letter from the morning’s mail which he found in his pocket, because it was addressed to him at school.

Yes, she was, indeed, like a song—a Beautiful Rose of the Night.

The waltz buoyed her up, brought her with it to a point of aching beauty and then let her slide back to life across its last bars as a leaf slants to earth across the air.

The high life of New York!

… back to Yale, put her picture in his bureau drawer and knock out home runs with the bases full this spring—at 8:30 the curtain would go up and She would miss something warm and young out of her life, something she had had this afternoon.

It was dark outside and Broadway was a blazing forest fire as Basil walked slowly along towards the point of brightest light.

He looked up at the great intersecting planes of radiance with a vague sense of approval and possession. He would see it a lot now, lay his restless heart upon this greater restlessness of a nation—he would come whenever he could get off from school.