The Coming of Bill quotes

It was her habit to refresh her mind and improve her health by a daily drive between the hours of two and four in the afternoon.

The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible that Mrs. Porter’s name is not familiar to you.

If this is the case, I am pained, but not surprised. It happens only too often that the uplifter of the public mind is baulked by a disinclination on the part of the public mind to meet him or her halfway.

It was not so long ago, she reflected with pride, that she had induced Ruth to refuse to marry Basil Milbank—a considerable feat, he being a young man of remarkable personal attractions and a great match in every way.

Mrs. Porter’s objection to him was that his father had died believing to the last that he was a teapot.

There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes; and Mrs. Porter had used all her influence with Ruth to make her reject Basil.

Mrs. Porter’s objection to him was that his father had died believing to the last that he was a teapot.

There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes

; and Mrs. Porter had used all her influence with Ruth to make her reject Basil. It was her success that first showed her how great that influence was.

He received the automobile in the small of the back, uttered a yell of surprise and dismay, performed a few improvised Texas Tommy steps, and fell in a heap.

In a situation which might have stimulated another to fervid speech, George Pennicut contented himself with saying “Goo!” He was a man of few words.

Mrs. Porter stopped the car. From all points of the compass citizens began to assemble, many swallowing their chewing-gum in their excitement.

Pennicut. Presented to him in these simple words, it checked the recriminatory speech which, his mind having recovered to some extent from the first shock of the meeting, he had intended to deliver. He swallowed his words, awed. He felt dazed and helpless.

Mrs. Porter had that effect upon men.

“No bones broken,” reported Mrs. Porter, concluding her examination. “You are exceedingly fortunate. You have a few bruises, and one knee is slightly wrenched. Nothing to signify. More frightened than hurt. Where do you live?”

A man, living alone, without money troubles to worry him, sinks inevitably into a routine.

Fatted ease is good for no one. It sucks the soul out of a man.

Kirk, as he sat smoking in the cool dusk of the studio, was wondering, almost in a panic, whether all was well with himself.

To such a pass had he come in the twenty-sixth year of his life.

Once the gods have marked a bachelor down, they give him few chances of escape.

It was when Kirk’s mood was at its blackest, and the figure of the abstract wife had ceased to be a menace and become a shining angel of salvation, that Lora Delane Porter, with Ruth Bannister at her side, rang the studio bell.

Porter who had fought her cause. It was Mrs. Porter who openly expressed her contempt for his money and certain methods of making it. She was the only person in his immediate sphere over whom he had no financial hold.

He was a man who liked to be surrounded by dependents, and Mrs. Porter stoutly declined to be a dependent.

She moved about the world, blunt and self-sufficing, and he hated her as he hated no one else. The thought that she had now come to grips with him and that he could best her in open fight was pleasant to him.

He knew he was being abominably weak, but he did not care. He even felt a certain pleasure in his surrender. Big, muscular men are given to this feebleness with women.

Hercules probably wore an idiotic grin of happiness when he spun wool for Omphale.

Since then the picture had been laid aside, but Kirk’s desire to be up and at it had grown with inaction. When a lazy man does make up his mind to assail a piece of work, he is like a dog with a bone.

William Bannister Winfield was the most wonderful child.

Of course, you had to have a certain amount of intelligence to see this.

William Bannister Winfield was the most wonderful child. Of course, you had to have a certain amount of intelligence to see this.

To the vapid and irreflective observer he was not much to look at in the early stages of his career, having a dough-like face almost entirely devoid of nose, a lacklustre eye, and the general appearance of a poached egg.

His immediate circle of intimates, however, thought him a model of manly beauty; and there was the undeniable fact that he had come into the world weighing nine pounds. Take him for all in all, a lad of promise.

Ruth hesitated between the army, the navy, the bar, and business. But everyone was agreed that William was to be something special.

This remarkable child had a keen sense of humour.

Thus he seldom began to cry in his best vein till the small hours of the morning; and on these occasions he would almost invariably begin again after he had been officially pronounced to be asleep.

As to his other characteristics, he was of rather an imperious nature. He liked to be waited on.

He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it.

The greater part of his attention being occupied at this period with the important duty of chewing his thumb, he assigned the drudgery of life to his dependants. Their duties were to see that he got up in the morning, dressed, and took his tub;

He made no objections to the expedition. On being told that he was going to see his grandpa he nodded curtly and said: “Gwa-wah,” after his custom.

For, as a conversationalist, perhaps the best description of him is to say that he tried hard.

He rarely paused for a word. When in difficulties he said something; he did not seek refuge in silence. That the something was not always immediately intelligible was the fault of his audience for not listening more carefully.

Steve gathered up William Bannister, the wheelbarrow, the box of bricks, and the dying pig and made his way to the gymnasium.

The worst of these prearranged scenes is that they never happen just as one figured them in one’s mind.

Steve had expected to have to wait a few minutes in the gymnasium, then there would be a step outside and the old man would enter. The beauty of this, to Steve’s mind, was that he himself would be “discovered,” as the stage term is;

My gratitude to her is the sort of gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.

Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone.

No, on the whole, she’s more like an earthquake.

“Well, what’s your trouble?” asked Kirk. “Why did you come back? Why aren’t you out there grabbing it with both hands and getting yourself into shape to be a walking goldmine to your friends? I don’t like to see this idle spirit in you, Hank.”

Hank smoked long and thoughtfully.

“No, it’s no good.”

“I ought to be. I’ve swallowed so much quinine since I saw you last that my ears are buzzing still. And then there are the insects. They all bite. Some bite worse than others, but not much.

Darn it! even the butterflies bite out there.

Every animal in the country has some other animal constantly chasing it until a white man comes along, when they call a truce and both chase him.

He had come to a knowledge of realities in the wilderness and to an appreciation of the fact that he had a soul which could not be kept alive except by honest work.

He had the decent man’s distaste for living on his wife’s money.

He supposed it was inevitable that a certain portion of it must go to his support, but he was resolved that there should be in the sight of the gods who look down on human affairs at least a reasonable excuse for his existence.

Meanwhile he was quite willing that Ruth should look upon his lifework as a pleasant pastime to save him from ennui.

Even to his wife a man is not always eager to exhibit his soul in its nakedness.

“By the way,” said Ruth, “you won’t find George Pennicut at the studio. He has gone back to England.”

Beside it on the wall hung a large thermometer. Various knobs of brass decorated the opposite wall. At the farther end of the room was a bath, complete with shower and all the other apparatus of a modern tub.

It was probably the most horrible room in all New York.

“Well, what do you think of it?” demanded Ruth proudly.

Kirk lit a cigar, bewildered.

It is always unpleasant to be the person to whom things have to be explained.

“Poor old boy,” Ruth went on, “you certainly are thin. But about Bill. I am afraid you are going to be a little upset about Bill, Kirk. Aunt Lora has no tact, and she will make a speech on every possible occasion;

“You will be good about it, won’t you, Kirk dear?” she said at last.

It is curious what a large part hair and its treatment may play in the undoing of strong men.

The case of Samson may be recalled in this connection. Kirk, with Ruth ruffling the wiry growth that hid his scalp, was incapable of serious opposition. He tried to be morose and resolute, but failed miserably.

“I couldn’t let him rough it like that. Aunt Lora would have a fit.”

Conditions being favourable, it only needs a spark to explode a powder magazine; and there are moments when a word can turn an outwardly calm and patient man into a raging maniac.

This introduction of Mrs. Porter’s name into the discussion at this particular point broke down the last remnants of Kirk’s self-control.

The child’s mouth opened. Steve eyed him, fascinated. No bird, encountering a snake, was ever so incapable of movement as he.

“Are you a germ?” inquired William Bannister.

Steve tottered to the cot and sat down on it. The relief was too much for him.

From the moving pictures she went to the house on Fifth Avenue. Finding that neither Ruth nor Mrs. Porter had returned, she went to the studio. Ringing the bell there and getting no answer, she took in the movies once more.

Mamie was a philosopher.

The atmosphere of the great house was still untroubled on her second visit. The care of the White Hope had always been left exclusively in the hands of the women, and the rest of the household had not yet detected his absence.

“No,” repeated Mr. Penway with iron resolution. “No young woman. No young woman whatsoever. I noticed it particularly, because I thought it strange, don’t you know—what I mean is, don’t you know, strange there shouldn’t be!”

How tragic is a man’s fruitless fight on behalf of a friend!

For one short instant Mrs. Porter allowed Mr. Penway to imagine that the victory was his, then she administered the coup de grâce.

It seemed to her that she was very much alone now.

She was marooned on a desert island of froth and laughter.

Everything that mattered she had lost.

A wave of humility swept over her. The pygmies of her world were springing up as giants, dwarfing her. The pinnacle of superiority on which she had stood so long was crumbling into dust.

She was finding herself. She winced again as the thought stabbed her that she was finding herself too late.

They reached the house in silence, each occupied with her own thoughts. The defiant look had died out of Sybil’s face and she was once more a child, crying because unknown forces had hurt it. But Ruth was not looking at her now.

Ruth reassured her, though it entailed a certain inconsistency on her part.

She had a true woman’s contempt for consistency.

“Of course you won’t have to go through it again. Bailey will be careful in future not to—not to do whatever it is that he has done.”

Absence had purified him of that dull anger which had been his so short a while before.

He looked back and marvelled that he could ever have imagined for a moment that he had ceased to love her.

Now, as he drove along the empty country roads, he forced his mind to dwell, as far as he could, only upon his son. There was a mist before his eyes as he thought of him. What a bully lad he had been!

“Oh, it wasn’t so hard, that part. I just hid in the house, and—but say, let’s forget it; it makes me feel kind of mean, somehow. It seems to me I may have lost Mamie her job.

It’s mighty hard to do the right thing by everyone in this world, ain’t it?

Come along in and see the kid. He’s great. Are you feeling ready for supper? Him and me was just going to start.”

“Gee!” Steve resumed his saga in a whirl of enthusiasm. “

Gee! if they’re right to start with, if they’re born right, if they’ve got the grit in them, you can’t sterilize it out of ’em if you use up half the germ-killer in the country.

From the way that kid acted you’d have thought he’d been spending the last year in a training-camp.