The Perfume of Eros quotes

“No,” he answered in reply to his mother’s question. The answer was strangely truthful. Fanny Price had tantalized him greatly. Semi-continuously he had thought of her for a long time. But not matrimonially.

To him matrimony meant always one woman more and usually one man less.

He had no wish to dwindle. When he was fifty he might, perhaps, to make a finish, marry some girl who wanted to begin. But that unselfishness was remote. He was quite young; what is worse, he was abominably good-looking.

“I believe in a great many things,” the lawyer replied.

“I have precisely three hundred and sixty-five beliefs⁠—one for every day in the year.”

“When the twenty-ninth of February comes around how do you manage then?” said Fanny.

Learning then from the ex-first lady that the girl’s name was not Cohen but Durand, he damned the apothecary and offered a hundred dollars to be introduced.

Poverty is not a crime. But it is rumored to be an incentive.

The crime which Loftus proposed to Mme. Machin is one which the code does not specify and the law cannot reach.

On that belief she would have staked her soul. Had he not sworn it? Precisely how she would have acted had she realized that he had lied like a thief one may surmise and never know.

The misery of life is the necessity of becoming accustomed to certain things.

There are natures that adapt themselves more readily than others. There are also natures that cannot adapt themselves at all. Had Marie realized the truth it may be that she would have beaten her head against the walls.

There are also natures that cannot adapt themselves at all. Had Marie realized the truth it may be that she would have beaten her head against the walls. Yet it may also be that in the end adaptability would have come. But not happiness.

Happiness consists, if it consists in anything, in being on good terms with oneself.

Had Marie known the truth never could she have been that. In the circumstances it was considerate of Loftus to withhold it from her. But Loftus was a very considerate person. He hated tears, and scenes he frankly abominated.

Try to fancy a busy poet. You cannot. It is an anomaly at which the imagination balks. By the same token you cannot fancy a useful Venus. You cannot fancy Psyche occupied with anything but love.

Love is⁠—or rather, should be⁠—woman’s sole occupation. The perfume of Eros should be about them all.

”

“The perfume of Eros!” muttered Annandale, to whom the phrase appealed. “The perfume of Eros!” he repeated and helped himself to wine. “I say, Orr, what the dickens is that?”

“Only the motor force of the universe.”

“Yes, indeed. It is the sublimate of love. And love is the source of human activity. It has no other. Without it civilization would retrograde and society return to the woods.

Her views are very strict. Even otherwise, to any decent girl, a man in his cups is not agreeable. But then, you know, it is not merely a question of that. It is a question of matrimony.

Matrimony generally means children. It is on them that the sins of the father are visited.

There is the rub. Sylvia, I have not a doubt, will in the end forgive you, but were she to marry you and her children have your sins visited on them, never would she forgive herself. That I am sure you can realize.

June meanwhile had come and gone. Summer with a frenzy quasi-maniacal had battened on the town. It is said that the hottest place in the world is a port on the Persian Gulf. But it is wrong to believe everything we hear.

When New York decides to be hot, the temperature of the Persian port must be agreeable by comparison.

One fetid noon Annandale fled. When he stopped it was at Narragansett.

The censorious allege that this is all wrong. It may be that they are right. But Nature is not censorious.

Nature is not even ethical. She has no standards of right, no canons of wrong. What she does have is her way.

A saint may defy her. Annandale was not that by a long shot. He was simply a human being, one that had been punished, and, as he thought, unjustly punished, for that which might have been condoned. Injustice humiliates.

He had written that he had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do not cure. Only time can do that.

Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge.

Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will.

Marie’s eyes filled. Had he struck her he would have hurt her far less. When next she saw him she told him so. The idea amused him.

He was not a ruffian, only a cad.

Like the whim, he waved the little tragedy away.

Barring great wealth and its fanfares and accompaniments, Fanny had enough to throw the average woman into stupors of envy, enough also to even satisfy her, if only instead of one man she had married another.

Annandale was very nice. He had but one defect. But that defect was fatal. He did not happen to be somebody else.

This defect Fanny had fancied that she could overlook. She was young, therefore ignorant, and, in fancying that she could ignore that fatal defect, fancied also that she had the ability to order herself about, to command her nature and dictate to her heart.

a toy which now and then he took up, but only because it was there, beneath his feet. Yet even then she was not quite unhappy. Even then she had faith. She believed in him still. Hope had not gone.

Hope has its braveries. Its outposts patrol our lives.

Until death annihilates it and us, always beyond is a sentry. The sentry which she still discerned was the promise he had made. Latterly it had not been much of a sentry. It had far more resembled a straw. But it was all she had.

He bought an extra. There, for his penny, in leaded type it stood. In ink, appropriately red, meagre details followed. As these sprang at him, mentally he bolted. Other purchasers were absorbing them pleasurably.

A good old-fashioned crime is so rare!

Then, too, of all crimes murder in Gramercy Park is rarest. Yet when in addition the victim is a man of fashion what more would you have for a cent?

With the air of one inquiring the time of day she glanced at Annandale and asked, almost with a lisp:

“Why didn’t you shoot me?”

Orr turned to Annandale. He was rising. From his face the flush had gone. He was lurid. The word lurid is used because it is more dramatic than its synonym, ghastly. And here was drama, real drama, in real life.

Fanny smiled afresh.

“No? Is it possible? But, then, perhaps, you never knew how a woman could love.”

She gave a little nod. It was as though she were adding, “Take that.”

You must appear so. Annandale did not. Alternately he was bored and buoyant. But not dejected, never depressed. He did not seem to feel that his life was at stake. That is the attitude of the habitual ruffian. But sentiment was veering.

Public opinion is a wave that thinks, thinks again, changes its mind, volatile as a woman.

At the opening everybody knew that Annandale was guilty. Now nobody was quite so sure.

“Did he make any threats regarding Loftus?”

“A gentleman does not make threats.”

“Miss Waldron, I will thank you to answer me directly. Did he or did he not?”

“Miss Waldron, I will thank you to answer me directly. Did he or did he not?”

It was perjury, of course. Yet if a girl may not perjure herself like a lady for the man she loves things have come to a pretty pass.

That idea apparently struck Peacock.

Anyway a thirty-two calibre pistol is among the exhibits. But how many more such pistols are there in this great city?

The ownership of one is not a proof of crime.

Nor is the fact that the body of the deceased was found in front of this defendant’s residence proof either. On the contrary.

On the contrary. The park wherein it lay is a parallelogram, and a body in it would be practically in front of every other house in the square.

How many jealous husbands reside in these houses I am not competent to say, but I am competent to tell you that the prosecution might just as well have arraigned any other resident there as this defendant

; yes, and better, were it not for Harris.”