The Glimpses of the Moon quotes

In spite of her past, Susy had preserved enough inner independence to detect the latent signs of it in others, and also to ascribe it impulsively to those of the opposite sex who happened to interest her.

She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what they need only have endured.

She herself meant eventually to marry, because one couldn’t forever hang on to rich people; but she was going to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of wealth with at least a minimum of companionableness.

Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity.

He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims.

It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his promise was a greater bore than he had expected.

He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims.

It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked.

But the keeping of his promise was a greater bore than he had expected.

“The answer to your question.

What is one to do—when one sees both sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it, indeed?

”

a man’s popularity is so much less precarious than a girl’s—but I know it would furbish me up tremendously to reappear as a married woman.” She glanced away from him down the long valley at their feet, and added in a lower tone: “

And I should like, just for a little while, to feel I had something in life of my very own—something that nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or a motor or an opera cloak.

”

go on honey-mooning for a year! What was he afraid of? Didn’t he think they’d be happy enough to want to keep it up? And why not at least try—get engaged, and then see what would happen?

Even if she was all wrong, and her plan failed, wouldn’t it have been rather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy they were going to be happy?

“I’ve often fancied it all by myself,” she concluded; “but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfully different....”

“And yet,” she continued, “Ellie Vanderlyn’s hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly isn’t a bit more dignified.... I wonder if it’s because I feel so horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big.”

She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been oppressed by the evidences of wealth.

She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands.... Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars. She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples:

but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life.

Now she found herself feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to her charged with a new weight of pity.

She was thinking of these things, and of the approaching date of Ellie Vanderlyn’s return, and of the searching truths she was storing up for that lady’s private ear, when she noticed a gondola turning its prow toward the steps below the balcony.

For the first time communal dawdling had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers were less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had known something so immeasurably better.

He had always felt himself to be the superior of his habitual associates, but now the advantage was too great: really, in a sense, it was hardly fair to them.

He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but he perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends heightened her animation.

Some days had elapsed since Susy and Nick had had a sunset to themselves, and in the interval Susy had once again learned the superior quality of the sympathy that held them together.

She now viewed all the rest of life as no more than a show: a jolly show which it would have been a thousand pities to miss, but which, if the need arose, they could get up and leave at any moment—provided that they left it together.

In the dusk, while their prow slid over inverted palaces, and through the scent of hidden gardens, she leaned against him and murmured, her mind returning to the recent scene with Ellie: “Nick, should you hate me dreadfully if I had no clothes?”

“I should simply worry myself ill if I weren’t sure of getting my things,” she said, in the tone of tender solicitude with which she always discussed her own difficulties. “

After all, people who deny themselves everything do get warped and bitter, don’t they?

” she argued plaintively, her lovely eyes wandering from one to the other of her assembled friends.

Late in the afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors.

He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening the languid air.

What visions he could build, if he dared, of being tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected garden—and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient intervals!

She gazed at him gravely. “

Why shouldn’t one like things that are out of one’s line?

” she answered; and he agreed, with a laugh, that it was often an incentive.

“So did I.

But life comes along, and upsets things.

”

He yawned, looked with disgust at his stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he had decided to go to Milan, and what on earth he should do when he got there.

The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left one facing a void....

When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out, got some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his journey to Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward postponed action and dulled thought;

It had been Susy’s suggestion (not his, thank God!); and perhaps in making it she had been more serious than he imagined. Perhaps, even if their rupture had not occurred, Strefford’s sudden honours might have caused her to ask for her freedom....

Money, luxury, fashion, pleasure: those were the four cornerstones of her existence.

He had always known it—she herself had always acknowledged it, even in their last dreadful talk together; and once he had gloried in her frankness.

“But why on earth don’t you and Nick go to my little place at Versailles for the honeymoon? I’m off to China, and you could have it to yourselves all summer,” the offer had been tempting enough to make the lovers waver.

It was such an artless ingenuous little house, so full of the demoralizing simplicity of great wealth, that it seemed to Susy just the kind of place in which to take the first steps in renunciation.

But Nick had objected that Paris, at that time of year, would be swarming with acquaintances who would hunt them down at all hours;

… the queer social whirligig from which she had so lately fled, it seemed natural enough that a shake of the box should have tossed Nat Fulmer into celebrity, and sent Violet Melrose chasing back from the ends of the earth to bask in his success.

Susy knew that Mrs. Melrose belonged to the class of moral parasites; for in that strange world the parts were sometimes reversed, and the wealthy preyed upon the pauper.

Wherever there was a reputation to batten on, there poor Violet appeared, a harmless vampire in pearls who sought only to feed on the notoriety which all her millions could not create for her.

That was the way of the world they lived in.

Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more—because nobody had time to remember.

The old risk of prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left with one’s drama, one’s disaster, on one’s hands, because there was nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying.

“Why, the hold of the things we all think we could do without.

Habits—they outstand the Pyramids.

Comforts, luxuries, the atmosphere of ease... above all, the power to get away from dulness and monotony, from constraints and uglinesses. You chose that power, instinctively, before you were even grown up; and so did Nick.

“Care?” He put his hand on hers. “

But, my dear, it’s just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite!

It’s because we know we can’t hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything....”

Her experience of such sojourns was varied enough to make her acutely conscious of their effect on her temporary hosts; and in the present case she knew that Violet was hardly aware of her presence.

But if no more than tolerated she was at least not felt to be an inconvenience; when your hostess forgot about you it proved that at least you were not in her way.

Violet, as usual, was perpetually on the wing, for her profound indolence expressed itself in a disordered activity. Nat Fulmer had returned to Paris; but Susy guessed that his benefactress was still constantly in his company, and that when Mrs.

But if no more than tolerated she was at least not felt to be an inconvenience; when your hostess forgot about you it proved that at least you were not in her way.

Violet, as usual, was perpetually on the wing, for her profound indolence expressed itself in a disordered activity.

Nat Fulmer had returned to Paris; but Susy guessed that his benefactress was still constantly in his company, and that when Mrs. Melrose was whirled away in her noiseless motor it was generally toward the scene of some new encounter between Fulmer and the arts.

it was clear that she was trying to dress up to Nat’s new situation. But, above all, she was rejoicing in it, filling her hungry lungs with the strong air of his success.

It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.

“My dear, it’s too wonderful! He’s told me to take as many concert and opera tickets as I like; he lets me take all the children with me. The big concerts don’t begin till later; but of course the Opera is always going.

‘This is genius!’ It seems funny he should care so much, when I’ve always known he had genius—and he has known it too. But they’re all so kind to him; and Mrs. Melrose especially.

And I suppose it makes a thing sound new to hear it said in a new voice.

”

Never in the world would she join their numbers.

Mrs. Melrose’s face fell, and she looked at Susy with the plaintive bewilderment of the wielder of millions to whom everything that cannot be bought is imperceptible.

“But I can’t see why you can’t change your plans,” she murmured with a soft persistency.

But they were beginning to produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable, that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days, was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that he needed.

There is probably no point on which the average man has more definite views than on the uselessness of writing a letter that is hard to write.

In the line he had sent to Susy from Genoa Nick had told her that she would hear from him again in a few days;

To Nick there was something reposeful in this lucid intellectual curiosity. He wanted above all things to get away from sentiment, from seduction, from the moods and impulses and flashing contradictions that were Susy.

Susy was not a great reader: her store of facts was small, and she had grown up among people who dreaded ideas as much as if they had been a contagious disease.

But, in the early days especially, when Nick had put a book in her hand, or read a poem to her, her swift intelligence had instantly shed a new light on the subject, and, penetrating to its depths, had extracted from them whatever belonged to …

But once the bargain struck her mind turned again to her own affairs, and she poured out her confidences to Susy over a succession of dishes that manifested the head-waiter’s understanding of the case.

Ursula’s confidences were always the same, though they were usually about a different person.

She demolished and rebuilt her sentimental life with the same frequency and impetuosity as that with which she changed her dress-makers, did over her drawing-rooms, ordered new motors, altered the mounting of her jewels, and generally renewed the setting of her life.

and just because they were so many, and all feverishly fighting to get the same things at the same time, they were all excited, happy and at ease. It was the most momentous period of the year: the height of the “dress makers’ season.”

Mrs. Vanderlyn had run across Susy Lansing at one of the Rue de la Paix openings, where rows of ladies wan with heat and emotion sat for hours in rapt attention while spectral apparitions in incredible raiment tottered endlessly past them on aching feet.

Distracted from the regal splendours of a chinchilla cloak by the sense that another lady was also examining it, Mrs. Vanderlyn turned in surprise at sight of Susy, whose head was critically bent above the fur.

Susy, leaning back against her cushions, examined through half-closed lids Mrs. Vanderlyn’s small delicately-restored countenance, which wore the same expression of childish eagerness as when she discoursed of the young Davenant of the moment.

Once again Susy remarked that, in Ellie’s agitated existence, every interest appeared to be on exactly the same plane.

“The poor shivering dear,” she answered laughing, “of course it shall have its nice warm winter cloak, and I’ll choose another one instead.”

whereas now of course every woman is trying for him. Oh, Susy, whatever you do, don’t miss your chance! You can’t conceive of the wicked plotting and intriguing there will be to get him—on all sides, and even where one least suspects it.

You don’t know what horrors women will do—and even girls!

” A shudder ran through her at the thought, and she caught Susy’s wrists in vehement fingers. “But I can’t think, my dear, why you don’t announce your engagement at once. People are beginning to do it, I assure you—it’s so much safer!”

“You’re very cruel, Susy—so cruel and dreadful that I hardly know how to answer you,” she stammered. “But you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.

As if anybody ever had all the money they wanted!

” She wiped her dark-rimmed eyes with a cautious handkerchief, glanced at herself in the mirror, and added magnanimously: “But I shall try to forget what you’ve said.”

It had all been merely epidermal, ephemeral, part of the trivial accepted “business” of the social comedy. But this kiss of Strefford’s was what Nick’s had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had decided their fate.

It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul.

And now, in the dreadful pause that followed—while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled the spoon in his cup, Susy remembered what she had seen through the circle of Nick’s kiss:

The Prince was not a warrior, however; he was stooping, pacific and spectacled, and his possession of the uniform had been revealed to Mrs. Hicks only by the gift of a full-length photograph in a Bond Street frame, with Anastasius written slantingly across its legs.

The Prince—and herein lay the Hickses’ undoing—the Prince was an archaeologist: an earnest anxious enquiring and scrupulous archaeologist.

Delicate health (so his suite hinted) banished him for a part of each year from his cold and foggy principality;

… should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk, and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto represented the higher life to the Hickses.

Now at last Mrs. Hicks saw the possibility of being at once artistic and luxurious, of surrendering herself to the joys of modern plumbing and yet keeping the talk on the highest level.

“If the poor dear Princess wants to dine at the Nouveau Luxe why shouldn’t we give her that pleasure?” Mrs. Hicks smilingly enquired; “and as for enjoying her buttered scones like a baby, as she says, I think it’s the sweetest thing about her.”

Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed him.

He had never before thought about putting together broken bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks.

He simply did not know how.

he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He simply did not know how.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.

The making of the substance called character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge one’s descendants in, after they too were dust.

It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.

The making of the substance called character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge one’s descendants in, after they too were dust.

Yet the Pyramid-instinct was the one which had made the world, made man, and caused his fugitive joys to linger like fading frescoes on imperishable walls....

“To marry me is the easiest way of not marrying all the others,” she laughed, as he stood before her one day in a quiet alley of the Bois de Boulogne, insisting on the settlement of various preliminaries. “

I believe I’m only a protection to you.

”

She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility to each other.

Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision.

She would have liked to say this to Streff—but he would not have understood it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain for a word that should reach him.

“Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything’s changed nowadays; why shouldn’t marriage be too?

A man can get out of a business partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to keep us noosed up to each other for life because we’ve blundered into a church one day and said ‘Yes’ before one of ’em.

No, no—that’s too easy. We’ve got beyond that. Science, and all these new discoveries.... I say the Ten Commandments were made for man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain’t a word against divorce in ’em, anyhow!

But, after all, why should she see him again?

She had had enough of explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity.

And she wanted above all—and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn—to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self.

her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death—before one got used to it.

To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it—felt so horribly alive!

How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson—well, he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it.

It had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her roused in him ideals she could never satisfy.

He had fallen in love with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she ceased to be all these things.

From that circle there was no issue, and in it he desperately revolved.

“Well, I’ve tried, and failed.

And I’m twenty-two, and I never was young.

I suppose I haven’t enough imagination.” She drew a deep breath. “Now I want something different.” She appeared to search for the word. “I want to be—prominent,” she declared.

but they had a certain grim nobility. And when she spoke of “the other kind of greatness” he knew that she understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something to draw him on, to get him to commit himself.

There was not a drop of guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled.

“The other kind of greatness?” he repeated.

That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.

From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.

No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy no sense of a missed vocation: “mothering” on a large scale would never, she perceived, be her job.

she remembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa in anything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which the child had said, showing Strefford’s trinket to her father: “Because I said I’d rather have it than a book.”

And here were children who consented to be left for three months by their parents, but on condition that a good reader was provided for them!

“Very well—I will! But what shall I be expected to read to you?” she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, after one of her sober pauses of reflection: “The little ones like nearly everything;

… it, had expected it, was already planning her future life in view of it—an effaced impersonal life in the service of somebody else’s children—when, in reality, under that thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the old hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes!

What was the use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, if the lawless self underneath could in an instant consume them like tinder?

She tried to collect herself—to understand what had happened. Nick was coming to Paris—coming not to see her but to consult his lawyer! It meant, of course, that he had definitely resolved to claim his freedom;

“Poor Susy got a pain too,” he said, putting his arms about her; and as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: “

Tell Geordie a new story, darling, and you’ll forget all about it.

”

she had never seemed more insistently near him than as their separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became less probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt of his memories.

There were moments when, to his memory, their actual embraces seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with this deep deliberate imprint of her soul on his.

Yet now it had become suddenly different.

but in reality the question had been on his lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mind since he had emerged from the railway station that morning.

The fact of not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock that has lost its hour hand.

The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place de l’Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had taken a house at Passy.

Anything, anything now, to get away from the maddening round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of solitude as months ago in Genoa.... Even if he were to run across Susy and Altringham, what of it? Better get the job over.

People had long since ceased to take on tragedy airs about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last, and met afterward in each other’s houses, happy in the consciousness that their respective remarriages had provided two new centres of entertainment.

Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings so philosophically had doubtless had their hour of enchantment, of belief in the immortality of loving; whereas he and Susy had simply and frankly entered into a business contract for their mutual advantage.

“

Then marry me, and find your reason afterward.

”

Her charms had overruled his judgment, and they had had their year... their mad year... or at least all but two or three months of it. But his first intuition had been right; and now they must both pay for their madness.

The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest.

Why not, then, now that the time had come, pay up gallantly, and remember of the episode only what had made it seem so supremely worth the cost?

The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught girl.

Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and how to attain its ends.

Not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love was hers.

Then she freed her wrists with an adroit twist, and leaning back against the pillows said judiciously: “

You’ll never in the world bring up a family of your own if you take on like this over other people’s children.

”