The Beautiful and Damned quotes

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.

Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”⁠—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage.

As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which …

After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-Second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses—and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory.

Here, after all, life began.

Here he slept, breakfasted, read, and entertained.

… the year that had passed since then, he had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with chapter titles and the division of his work into periods, but not one line of actual writing existed at present, or seemed likely ever to exist.

He did nothing⁠—and contrary to the most accredited copybook logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves.

He did nothing—and contrary to the most accredited copybook logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves.

It was pleasant to sit lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of Erewhon. It was pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter humming along the hall to his bath.

They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity; Maury Noble behind that fine and absurdly catlike face is all but purring. And Anthony, nervous as a will-o’-the-wisp, restless—he is at rest now.

They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in.

Seven o’clock. Where’s the Caramel? Impatiently. I wish he’d finish that interminable novel. I’ve spent more time hungry—

Maury laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening of his features.

Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than anyone else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

Oh, yes. Impressive!

I know—with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.”

And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

I know—with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.” And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

In other words, Dick, you’re playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.

To Maury. On the contrary, I’d feel that it being a meaningless world, why write?

The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

No, sir! I believe that everyone in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals—Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain of conventional morality.

I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

Here the soup arrives and what Maury might have gone on to say is lost for all time.

It’s expected that they’ll be very busy shortly.

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

What will I be? Tell me?

At length. It’s a sort of bogus aristocrat.

That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus.

Also, you will do much that is bogus.

“I simply mean that a talent like Wells’s could carry the intelligence of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas.

And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.

”

“No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material.

But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living.

Don’t tell me you like this ‘Divine Function of the Artist’ business?”

The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of that strong persuasive mind, that temperament almost Oriental in its outward impassivity, warmed Anthony’s restless soul and brought him a peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives.

One must understand all⁠—else one must take all for granted.

Maury filled the room, tigerlike, godlike. The winds outside were stilled; the brass candlesticks on the mantel glowed like tapers before an altar.

After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical.

They were in love with generalities.

Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the brisk aphorisms in the notebook seemed to him the quintessence of criticism.

It is fair to analyze Anthony as far as he could analyze himself; further than that it is, of course, presumption. He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness.

The idea of eating alone frightened him; in preference he dined often with men he detested.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream’s shadow.

—If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do. It worried him to think that he was, after all, a facile mediocrity, with neither the poise of Maury nor the enthusiasm of Dick.

It seemed a tragedy to want nothing⁠—and yet he wanted something, something.

He knew in flashes what it was—some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

“Tell me. I’ll believe it.

I always believe anything anyone tells me about myself⁠—don’t you?

”

“

I’m going to start being that. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.

”

“I do nothing,” he began, realizing simultaneously that his words were to lack the debonair grace he craved for them. “

I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.

”

“

I suppose so, if they’re gracefully lazy. Is that possible for an American?

”

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas.

Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

“Well,” he admitted apologetically, “neither do I, of course, but—”

“Just that I’m not a realist,” he said, and then: “

No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.

”

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance—that was all.

She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it⁠—then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

Her fingernails were too long and ornate, polished to a pink and unnatural fever. Her clothes were too tight, too stylish, too vivid, her eyes too roguish, her smile too coy.

She was almost pitifully overemphasized from head to foot.

The other girl was obviously a more subtle personality. She was an exquisitely dressed Jewess with dark hair and a lovely milky pallor. She seemed shy and vague, and these two qualities accentuated a rather delicate charm that floated about her.

“You’re such a swan in this light,” he whispered after a moment.

There were silences as murmurous as sound.

There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

He did not greet Gloria except by rising, and he immediately resumed a conversation with Richard Caramel about the influence of literature on the moving pictures.

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys.

The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys.

The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Along the shelves of Anthony’s library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Thérèse of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into …

“

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

”

However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes.

She was beautiful⁠—but especially she was without mercy.

He must own that strength that could send him away.

“What?”

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

But oh, Anthony’s face as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza that night! His dark eyes were gleaming—around his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression—yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony.

He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration.

Peace was restored—the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.

Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression—yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

“What a pity!” she complained; “they’d look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white.

I’m mighty happy just this minute, in this city.

”

“

I think the city’s a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it.

Trying to be romantically metropolitan.”

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

That first half-year—the trip West, the long months’ loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary—those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours.

The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship.

The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew.

Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain. …

The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s gone; Washington Irving’s dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year—then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should.

Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

”

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

“But it won’t be⁠—like our two beds⁠—ever again. Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost⁠—something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here⁠—”

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to cry—Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.

At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ⁠—and once he was an organ-grinder!

The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder!

The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing—oh, that eternal hand!—a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist …

“I’m tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where to live.”

“My exquisite wife wearies of thought,” remarked Anthony ironically. “She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let’s go out to tea.”

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick’s advice literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the wood.

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity.

There was something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months’ consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent’s car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country roadhouse.

“Oh, entirely—and quite inexpressibly. Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly inconsistent with me.

Brutal men were tender, negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were anything but honorable.

”

“With just a little piece of ice in the water,” she added. “Do you suppose I could have that?”

Gloria used the adjective “little” whenever she asked a favor⁠—it made the favor sound less arduous.

But Anthony laughed again—whether she wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go downstairs to the kitchen. … Her voice followed him through the hall: “And just a little cracker with just a little marmalade on it. …”

This dignity appeared also in his personality. The last aura of the successful travelling-man had faded from him, that deliberate ingratiation of which the lowest form is the bawdy joke in the Pullman smoker.

One imagined that, having been fawned upon financially, he had attained aloofness; having been snubbed socially, he had acquired reticence.

But whatever had given him weight instead of bulk, Anthony no longer felt a correct superiority in his presence.

“How you’ve changed!” remarked Gloria.

“Once you told me you didn’t see why an American couldn’t loaf gracefully.”

“Well, damn it, I wasn’t married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it’s going round and round like a cogwheel with nothing to catch it.

Anecdotes were told about him—how one of the vice-presidents had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on margin, “and now look where he is!”

Such, obviously, was the stuff of life⁠—a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.

To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind.

He even regretted, silently, before he went to bed that he had so hastily mailed his resignation.

“Even when everything seems rotten you can’t trust that judgment,” Gloria had said. “It’s the sum of all your judgments that counts.”

In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Marietta, encouraging them to take the gray house for another year at a slightly increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures.

With me? No—I didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife—nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the business—it is the dress that passion wears. I became bored—that was all.

Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.

Beauty was behind me, do you understand?—I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.”

“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion.

Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts.

But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression—but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light.

I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression—but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism—and behold! Jones was still in my way.

I did not think⁠—I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.

“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness.

“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness.

Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life⁠—and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.

“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.

“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting.

It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you⁠—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.

So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest.

So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

”

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe—why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine.

Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour—but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals today, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France—” He hesitated, and then added:

And that is all. He turns, and assisted by his cane goes out through the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentousness his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the August moon.

In this extremity they were like two goldfish in a bowl from which all the water had been drawn; they could not even swim across to each other.

Gloria would be twenty-six in May. There was nothing, she had said, that she wanted, except to be young and beautiful for a long time, to be gay and happy, and to have money and love.

They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one—otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet.

He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string.

But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim.

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable.

The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality;

This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position.

In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.

In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife.

“

I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.

”

After a day or so of this, they would make an engagement, and then—Oh, what did it matter? This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic!

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

Meanwhile the suit progressed slowly, with interminable examinations of witnesses and marshallings of evidence. The preliminary proceedings of settling the estate were finished. Mr. Haight saw no reason why the case should not come up for trial before summer.

the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success.

At last everyone had something to talk about⁠—and almost everyone fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.

Anthony, Maury, and Dick sent in their applications for officers’ training-camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless;

They must have pondered upon what they had done to one another, and each must have accused himself of drawing this sombre pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely.

At the last they were too far away for either to see the other’s tears.

This time Anthony had a good look at him.

He was young, thin, already faded; he was like his own mustache; he was like a great piece of shiny straw.

His chin receded, faintly; this was offset by a magnificent and unconvincing scowl, a scowl that Anthony was to connect with the faces of many young officers during the ensuing year.

He considered that by a combination of foresight and dauntless efficiency he had raised himself to his current magnificence. He aped the particular tyrannies of every officer under whom he had served in times gone by.

His frown was frozen on his brow⁠—before giving a private a pass to go to town he would ponderously weigh the effect of such an absence upon the company, the army, and the welfare of the military profession the world over.

Lieutenant Kretching, blond, dull and phlegmatic, introduced Anthony ponderously to the problems of attention, right face, about face, and at ease. His principal defect was his forgetfulness.

As a rule things happened to Dot.

She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave.

She neither defied nor conformed nor compromised.

“—When you wa‑ake You shall ha‑ave All the pretty little hawsiz—”

Then, as though it had been waiting on a nearby roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl’s face to the color of white roses.

Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen—a spring night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years before—another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights …

Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic, and enthusiastic. This latter quality, indeed, often took material form and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth.

Like most executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an excellent war deserved.

For all his anxiety and absorption he was having the time of his life.

“Dot,” he whispered uncomfortably, “you’ll forget.

Things are sweeter when they’re lost.

I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all.

Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room.

It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone—” He broke off uneasily.

“

What’s death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put ’em together so pretty.

”

For a moment, while conflicting warnings and desires prompted Anthony, it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late—everything was too late.

For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.

“Come with me, Dot—little loving Dot. Oh, come with me. I couldn’t leave you now—”

With a sob she wound her arms around him and let him support her weight while the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world, showered its illicit honey over the drowsy street.

Early September in Camp Boone, Mississippi. The darkness, alive with insects, beat in upon the mosquito-netting, beneath the shelter of which Anthony was trying to write a letter.

It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was in a righteous temper because he was a West Pointer, and the war was going to stop before he could get overseas.

Had the militant governments realized the number of broken hearts among the older West Pointers during that week, they would indubitably have prolonged the slaughter another month.

The thing was pitiable!

a dark-haired girl sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the uttermost celestial foresight.

The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness⁠—hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph.

Under these bright lights glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away, whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Baghdad, in Tyre, a hundred generations before;

“Oh, my Gloria!” he cried.

Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.

Also it was forgiven that Rachael had been witness to the greatest disaster in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Patch—

Compromising with events time moves along.

The Wiles of Captain Collins

“

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?

”

“Well—I can’t see the slightest benefit in laughing myself sick over this sort of affair.

If there’s anything older than the old story, it’s the new twist.

”

One’s host now brought out a bottle upon the slightest pretext. The tendency to display liquor was a manifestation of the same instinct that led a man to deck his wife with jewels.

To have liquor was a boast, almost a badge of respectability.

In the mornings Anthony awoke tired, nervous, and worried. Halcyon summer twilights and the purple chill of morning alike left him unresponsive.

It was November, Indian summer rather, and a warm, warm night—which was unnecessary, for the work of the summer was done. Babe Ruth had smashed the home-run record for the first time and Jack Dempsey had broken Jess Willard’s cheekbone out in Ohio.

Over in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars.

In New York City the proletariat were being “disciplined,” and the odds on Harvard were generally quoted at five to three. Peace had come down in earnest, the beginning of new days.

She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of childbearing, the menace to her beauty—had appalled her.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself.

Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only—the early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony.

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

One day in the midst of Gloria’s illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss McGovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet.

But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe floor.

This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes.

She tried to think that it had been the makeup, but her emotions were too profound, too overwhelming for any consolation that the thought conveyed.

“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately grieving. “Oh, my pretty face!

Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face!

Oh, what’s happened?”

“Why, of course.

Aristocracy’s only an admission that certain traits which we call fine⁠—courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing⁠—can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don’t have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

”

“

I don’t know. We just go on.

”

… hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent.

It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers⁠—this force intangible as air, more definite than death.

Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were a recurrent burden.

Parker Allison’s notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him.

He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one⁠—his imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.

Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many afternoons of the summer and fall.

At long intervals now some incident, some gesture of Gloria’s, would take his fancy—but the gray veils had come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older those things faded—after that there was wine.

There was a kindliness about intoxication⁠—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

After a few highballs there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky.

Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals.

There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.

On Forty-Second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.

“You probably think you know,” suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. “

The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed.

The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.”

“All of them. Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now.

To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that’s never been beautiful before.

Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can’t go any further—except in the novel, perhaps.”