The Adventures of Sally quotes

At her end of the table the conversation had turned once more to the great vital topic of Sally’s legacy and what she ought to do with it.

The next best thing to having money of one’s own, is to dictate the spending of somebody else’s, and Sally’s guests were finding a good deal of satisfaction in arranging a budget for her.

Rumour having put the sum at their disposal at a high figure, their suggestions had certain spaciousness.

His audience did not seem surprised.

It was possible that life, always prolific of incident in a great city like New York, might some day produce an occasion which Mr. Faucitt would feel that he could allow to pass without saying a few words; but nothing of the sort had happened as yet, and they had given up hope.

Right from the start of the meal they had felt that it would be optimism run mad to expect the old gentleman to abstain from speech on the night of Sally Nicholas’ farewell dinner party;

Her eyes, which disappeared when she laughed, which was often, were a bright hazel; her hair a soft mass of brown. She had, moreover, a manner, an air of distinction lacking in the majority of Mrs. Meecher’s guests.

And she carried youth like a banner.

In approving of Sally, the Marvellous Murphys had been guilty of no lapse from their high critical standard.

And Sally, seeing it, debated in her mind for an instant the advisability of throwing an orange at her brother. There was one lying ready to her hand, and his glistening shirtfront offered an admirable mark; but she restrained herself.

After all, if a hostess yields to her primitive impulses, what happens? Chaos.

She had just frowned down the exuberance of the rebellious Murphys, and she felt that if, even with the highest motives, she began throwing fruit, her influence for good in that quarter would be weakened.

A democratic girl, pomposity was a quality which she thoroughly disliked; and though she loved him, she could not disguise from herself that, ever since affluence had descended upon him some months ago, her brother Fillmore had become insufferably pompous.

If there are any young men whom inherited wealth improves, Fillmore Nicholas was not one of them.

He seemed to regard himself nowadays as a sort of Man of Destiny. To converse with him was for the ordinary human being like being received in audience by some more than standoffish monarch.

and, when he had come, he had entered wearing such faultless evening dress that he had made the rest of the party look like a gathering of tramp-cyclists.

His white waistcoat alone was a silent reproach to honest poverty, and had caused an awkward constraint right through the soup and fish courses.

Most of those present had known Fillmore Nicholas as an impecunious young man who could make a tweed suit last longer than one would have believed possible; they had called him “Fill” and helped him in more than usually lean times with small loans:

… podgy hand on the tablecloth and the thumb of the other in his pocket, glanced down the table with eyes so haughtily drooping that Sally’s fingers closed automatically about her orange, as she wondered whether even now it might not be a good thing …

It seems to be one of Nature’s laws that the most attractive girls should have the least attractive brothers.

Fillmore Nicholas had not worn well. At the age of seven he had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, but after that he had gone all to pieces;

And it had been Sally who had achieved triumph in the one battle which Mrs. Meecher, apparently as a matter of duty, always brought about with each of her patrons in the first week of their stay.

A sweet-tempered girl, Sally, like most women of a generous spirit, had cyclonic potentialities.

As she seemed to have said her say, Fillmore kept on expanding till he had reached the normal, when he ventured upon a speech for the defence.

“Anyway, what I mean is, I don’t see why, just because one has known people at a certain period in one’s life when one was practically down and out, one should have them round one’s neck forever.

One can’t prevent people forming an I-knew-him-when club, but, darn it, one needn’t attend the meetings.

”

People fussed about you and bothered you. People either watched you or avoided you. Such were his arguments, and Sally, who would have glossed over and found excuses for a disposition on his part towards homicide or arson, put them down to artistic sensitiveness.

There is nobody so sensitive as your artist, particularly if he be unsuccessful: and when an artist has so little success that he cannot afford to make a home for the woman he loves, his sensitiveness presumably becomes great indeed.

Putting herself in his place, Sally could see that a protracted engagement, known by everybody, would be a standing advertisement of Gerald’s failure to make good: and she acquiesced in the policy of secrecy, hoping that it would not last long.

With the buoyant optimism which never deserted her for long, she had already begun to cast off her momentary depression. After all, did it matter who financed a play so long as it obtained a production?

A manager was simply a piece of machinery for paying the bills; and if he had money for that purpose, why demand asceticism and the finer sensibilities from him?

The real thing that mattered was the question of who was going to play the leading part, that deftly drawn character which had so excited the admiration of Elsa Doland. She sought information on this point.

The first of the pair did not attract her. He was a tall, dark man whose tight, precise mouth and rather high cheek bones gave him an appearance vaguely sinister.

He had the dusky look of the clean-shaven man whose life is a perpetual struggle with a determined beard.

He certainly shaved twice a day, and just as certainly had the self-control not to swear when he cut himself. She could picture him smiling nastily when this happened.

The red-haired young man made no reply. He continued to gaze down the beach.

Of all outdoor sports, few are more stimulating than watching middle-aged Frenchmen bathe.

Drama, action, suspense, all are here. From the first stealthy testing of the water with an apprehensive toe to the final seal-like plunge, there is never a dull moment.

We have only ourselves to blame if we are ignorant of what to do before the doctor comes, of how to make a dainty winter coat for baby out of father’s last year’s under-vest and of the best method of coping with the cold mutton.

But nobody yet has come forward with practical advice as to the correct method of behaviour to be adopted when a lift-attendant starts crying.

And Sally and her companion, as a consequence, for a few moments merely stared at each other helplessly.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t enjoy chatting with this blighter. I mean to say, it’s a bit of an effort.

I don’t know why it is, but talking French always makes me feel as if my nose were coming off.

Couldn’t we just leave him to have his cry out by himself?”

“No, not a cent. Wasn’t it extraordinary!

Have you ever heard of a blindly trusted uncle who was perfectly honest?

Well, mine was. But the trouble was that, while an excellent man to have looking after one’s money, he wasn’t a very lovable character. He was very hard. Hard! He was as hard as—well, nearly as hard as this seat. He hated poor Fill …”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was rather fun for a while. Still,” said Sally, meditatively, “I’m not saying I could have held out much longer: I was beginning to give.

I suppose I’ve been trampled underfoot by more fat men than any other girl of my age in America.

I don’t know why it was, but every man who came in who was a bit overweight seemed to make for me by instinct. That’s why I like to sit on the sands here and watch these Frenchmen bathing.

I don’t know why it was, but every man who came in who was a bit overweight seemed to make for me by instinct. That’s why I like to sit on the sands here and watch these Frenchmen bathing.

It’s just heavenly to lie back and watch a two hundred and fifty pound man coming along and feel that he isn’t going to dance with me.

”

That is to say,” said Ginger, coldly accurate, “he started laying into him with a stick.” He brooded for a moment with knit brows. “A spaniel, mind you!

Can you imagine anyone beating a spaniel? It’s like hitting a little girl.

Well, he’s a fairly oldish man, you know, and that hampered me a bit: but I got hold of the stick and broke it into about eleven pieces, and by great good luck it was a stick he happened to value rather highly.

“Epatant!” murmured a wistful man at Sally’s side, removing an elbow from her ribs in order the better to gesticulate. Sally, though no French scholar, gathered that he was startled and gratified. The entire crowd seemed to be startled and gratified.

There is undoubtedly a certain altruism in the makeup of the spectators at a Continental roulette-table. They seem to derive a spiritual pleasure from seeing somebody else win.

The croupier gave his moustache a twist with his left hand and the wheel a twist with his right, and silence fell again.

A job’s a thing you’ve got to choose for yourself and get for yourself.

Think what you can do⁠—there must be something⁠—and then go at it with a snort and grab it and hold it down and teach it to take a joke.

You’ve managed to collect some money. It will give you time to look round. And, when you’ve had a look round, do something! Try to realize you’re alive, and try to imagine the family isn’t!”

“

I thought it was only royalty that called themselves ‘we.’

”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she snapped, “do try to be human, and don’t always be snubbing people.

You remind me of one of those portraits of men in the eighteenth century, with wooden faces, who look out of heavy gold frames at you with fishy eyes as if you were a regrettable incident.

”

“Thanks.” Bruce Carmyle wrote the information down with a gold pencil in a dapper little morocco-bound notebook.

He was the sort of man who always has a pencil, and the backs of old envelopes never enter into his life.

There was a pause. Bruce Carmyle coughed.

Ginger’s depression deepened. A dinner with Uncle Donald would hardly have been a cheerful function, even in the surroundings of a banquet in the Arabian Nights.

There was that about Uncle Donald’s personality which would have cast a sobering influence over the orgies of the Emperor Tiberius at Capri.

To dine with him at a morgue like that relic of Old London, Bleke’s Coffee House, which confined its custom principally to regular patrons who had not missed an evening there for half a century, was to touch something very near bedrock.

Since his return to London Ginger had been in bad shape. He mooned through the days and slept poorly at night.

If there is one thing rottener than another in a pretty blighted world, one thing which gives a fellow the pip and reduces him to the condition of an absolute onion, it is hopeless love.

Hopeless love had got Ginger all stirred up. His had been hitherto a placid soul. Even the financial crash which had so altered his life had not bruised him very deeply.

Hard thoughts … hard thoughts! And getting harder all the time, for nothing grows more quickly than a mood of rebellion.

Rebellion is a forest fire that flames across the soul.

The spark had been lighted in Ginger, and long before he reached Hyde Park Corner he was ablaze and crackling.

Meanwhile, the decent thing to do, if she did not want to brand herself in the sight of her conscience as a female Fillmore, was to go back temporarily to Mrs. Meecher’s admirable establishment and foregather with her old friends.

After all, home is where the heart is, even if there are more prunes there than the gourmet would consider judicious.

Perhaps it was the unavoidable complacency induced by the thought that she was doing the right thing, or possibly it was the tingling expectation of meeting Gerald Foster again after all these weeks of separation, that made the familiar streets seem wonderfully bright as she …

… the unavoidable complacency induced by the thought that she was doing the right thing, or possibly it was the tingling expectation of meeting Gerald Foster again after all these weeks of separation, that made the familiar streets seem wonderfully bright as she drove through them.

It was a perfect, crisp New York morning, all blue sky and amber sunshine, and even the ashcans had a stimulating look about them.

The street cars were full of happy people rollicking off to work: policemen directed the traffic with jaunty affability: and the white-clad street-cleaners went about their poetic tasks with a quiet but none the less noticeable relish.

She insisted on bringing him here. He was yapping then, as he was yapping when, with womanly resource which I cannot sufficiently praise, you decoyed him hence. And each yap went through me like hammer-strokes on sheeted tin. Sally, you stand alone among womankind.

You shine like a good deed in a naughty world.

When did you get back?”

“

One thousand individual mice are nibbling the base of my spine, and I am conscious of a constant need of cooling refreshment.

But what of that? Your presence is a tonic. Tell me, how did our Sally enjoy foreign travel?”

“

She has the face of an angel and the histrionic ability of that curious suet pudding which our estimable Mrs. Meecher is apt to give us on Fridays.

In my professional career I have seen many cases of what I may term the Lady Friend in the role of star, but Miss Hobson eclipses them all.

She analysed her sensations, and arrived at the conclusion that what she was resenting was the fact that Gerald was trying to get the advantages of two attitudes simultaneously.

A man in trouble may either be the captain of his soul and superior to pity, or he may be a broken thing for a woman to pet and comfort.

Gerald, it seemed to her, was advertising himself as an object for her commiseration, and at the same time raising a barrier against it. He appeared to demand her sympathy while holding himself aloof from it.

This seemed to strike the erring Teddy, if not as reasonable, at any rate as one way of looking at it. He delivered the speech in an injured tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally could feel it.

The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong.

The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to the last syllable more than a week ago—these things had sapped the nerve of the Primrose Way Company and demoralization …

Miss Mabel Hobson had practically every personal advantage which nature can bestow with the exception of a musical voice.

Her figure was perfect, her face beautiful, and her hair a mass of spun gold; but her voice in moments of emotion was the voice of a peacock.

“Say, listen to me for just one moment!”

Sally remembered Mr. Faucitt’s story of the lady who got the bird at Wigan. She did not see how history could fail to repeat itself.

The theatrical public of America will endure much from youth and beauty, but there is a limit.

A shrill, passionate cry from the front row, and Mr. Bunbury was on his feet again. Sally could not help wondering whether things were going particularly wrong today, or whether this was one of Mr. Bunbury’s ordinary mornings.

Miss Hobson, thus assailed by an underling, spun round and dropped the lipstick, which was neatly retrieved by the assiduous Mr. Cracknell.

Mr. Cracknell had his limitations, but he was rather good at picking up lipsticks.

“What’s that? I took it? I never did anything of the sort.”

Good heavens!” he cried, stung by the way fate was maltreating him, “I have never experienced anything like this before. I have been producing plays all my life, and this is the first time this has happened.

I have produced Nazimova. Nazimova never threw paper-knives at cats.

”

She made her way to that picturesque ruin.

Fillmore had the air of a man who thought it wasn’t loaded.

A wild, startled expression had settled itself upon his face and he was breathing heavily.

“Yes.

And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

”

For an instant it stood out nakedly without concealment, and the world became a forlorn place. She had realized the fundamental difference between man’s outlook on life and woman’s.

Success! How men worshipped it, and how little of themselves they had to spare for anything else.

Ironically, it was the theme of this very play of Gerald’s which she had saved from destruction.

Success! How men worshipped it, and how little of themselves they had to spare for anything else. Ironically, it was the theme of this very play of Gerald’s which she had saved from destruction.

Of all the men she knew, how many had any view of life except as a race which they must strain every nerve to win, regardless of what they missed by the wayside in their haste?

Fillmore—Gerald—all of them. There might be a woman in each of their lives, but she came second—an afterthought—a thing for their spare time. Gerald was everything to her. His success would never be more than a side-issue as far as she was concerned.

She wondered now how she could ever have looked with approval on her rash act. She wondered what demon of interference and meddling had possessed her, to make her blunder into people’s lives, upsetting them.

She wondered that she was allowed to go around loose. She was nothing more nor less than a menace to society.

Here was an estimable young man, obviously the sort of young man who would always have to be assisted through life by his relatives, and she had deliberately egged him on to wreck his prospects.

“I say, you know!” said Ginger, as the merriment showed no signs of abating. Ginger was concerned.

Nasty shock for a girl, finding blighters under her bed.

Sally sat up, gurgling, and wiped her eyes.

“But what?

You’ve no notion how well all these blighters here seem to be able to get along without my help.

I’ve tramped all over the place, offering my services, but they all say they’ll try to carry on as they are.”

That’s what I love about him. That and the way his ears wiggle when he gets excited. Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate.

All the unhappy marriages come from the husband having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.

” She broke off and scrutinized Sally closely. “Say, what do you do with your skin?”

He is a chump, you know. That’s what I love about him. That and the way his ears wiggle when he gets excited.

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump.

Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from the husband having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.” She broke off and scrutinized Sally closely.

“Well,” said Miss Winch enviously, “I wish I could train my darned fool of a complexion to get that way.

Freckles are the devil. When I was eight I had the finest collection in the Middle West, and I’ve been adding to it right along.

Some folks say lemon-juice’ll cure ’em. Mine lap up all I give ’em and ask for more. There’s only one way of getting rid of freckles, and that is to saw the head off at the neck.”

He loafed aimlessly about the streets. He wandered in the Park and out again. The Park bored him. The streets bored him. The whole city bored him.

A city without Sally in it was a drab, futile city, and nothing that the sun could do to brighten it could make it otherwise.

Night came at last, and with it a letter. It was the first even passably pleasant thing that had happened to Ginger in the whole of this dreary and unprofitable day: for the envelope bore the crest of the good ship Mauretania.

As a rule, the severity of his surroundings afflicted Ginger with a touch of gloom when he went to bed; but tonight—such is the magic of a letter from the right person—he was uplifted and almost gay.

There are moments when even illuminated texts over the washstand cannot wholly quell us.

There was nothing of haste and much of ceremony in Ginger’s method of approaching the perusal of his correspondence.

He had a confused sensation, as though his nervous system had been stirred up with a pole. He struggled for breath and moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, staring at her continuously during the process.

Great men, in their moments of weakness, are to be pitied rather than scorned.

If ever a man had an excuse for leaping like a young ram, Fillmore had it. He had left Sally not much more than a week ago in England, in Shropshire, at Monk’s Crofton.

He honestly liked and respected the man. He appreciated his quiet and aristocratic reserve. A well-bred fellow, sensible withal, just the sort of husband a girl like Sally needed. And now she had ruined everything.

With the capricious perversity which so characterizes her otherwise delightful sex, she had spilled the beans.

“Oh, Fill!” Sally had expected that realization of the facts would produce these symptoms in him, but now that they had presented themselves she was finding them rasping to the nerves. “I should have thought the reason was obvious.”

Mr. Lew Lucas, for one, was noticeably pleased. So were Mr. Lucas’s seconds, one of whom went so far as to kiss him. And most of the crowd, who had betted heavily on the champion, were delighted. Yet Bugs Butler did not rejoice.

It is not too much to say that his peevish bearing struck a jarring note in the general gaiety.

A heavy frown disfigured his face as he slouched from the ring.

No right to, of course. A sparring-partner isn’t supposed …”

“Ginger,” said Sally, “you’re too good to live.”

“I believe if someone sandbagged you and stole your watch and chain you’d say there were faults on both sides or something. I’m just a cat, and I say I wish your beast of a Bugs Butler had perished miserably.

Her gay prettiness seemed to flick at him like a whip in the darkness of wakeful nights, lashing him to pursuit. And quietly and methodically, like a respectable wolf settling on the trail of a Red Riding Hood, he prepared to pursue.

Delicacy and imagination might have kept him back, but in these qualities he had never been strong. One cannot have everything.

His preparations for departure, though he did his best to make them swiftly and secretly, did not escape the notice of the Family.

Bruce Carmyle’s customary respectfulness was tinged with something approaching dislike as he looked at him.

Uncle Donald’s walrus moustache heaved gently upon his laboured breath, like seaweed on a ground-swell.

There had been stairs to climb.

Uncle Donald had had a previous experience of being defied by a nephew, but it had not accustomed him to the sensation. He was aware of an unpleasant feeling of impotence.

Nothing is harder than to know what to do next when defied.

Mr. Carmyle having started to defy, evidently decided to make a good job of it.

Bruce Carmyle’s patience snapped and he sank like a stone to absolutely Gingerian depths of plain-spokenness.

“Oh, damn the Family!” he cried.

There was a painful silence, broken only by the relieved sigh of the armchair as Uncle Donald heaved himself out of it.

“That whisky.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” said Uncle Donald.

He was leaning towards her, whispering in her ear. The room was hotter than it had ever been, noisier than it had ever been, fuller than it had ever been. The bird on the roof was singing again and now she understood what it said.

“Take me out of this!” Did anything matter except that?

What did it matter how one was taken, or where, or by whom, so that one was taken.

Sally laid her hand on his.

“Ginger, dear,” she said, “I do love you. I ought to have known it all along, but I seem to be understanding myself tonight for the first time.”

She got up and bent over him for a swift moment, whispering in his ear, “I shall never love anyone but you, Ginger. Will you try to remember that.”

“Ginger, dear,” she said, “I do love you. I ought to have known it all along, but I seem to be understanding myself tonight for the first time.” She got up and bent over him for a swift moment, whispering in his ear,

“I shall never love anyone but you, Ginger. Will you try to remember that.”

She was moving away, but he caught at her arm and stopped her.

There was a sharp crack as the occasional table, never designed by its maker to bear heavy weights, gave way in a splintering flurry of broken legs under the pressure of the master of the house: and Sally’s mood underwent an abrupt change.

There are few situations in life which do not hold equal potentialities for both tragedy and farce, and it was the ludicrous side of this drama that chanced to appeal to Sally at this moment.

Her sense of humour was tickled. It was, if she could have analysed her feelings, at herself that she was mocking—at the feeble sentimental Sally who had once conceived the absurd idea of taking this preposterous man seriously.