David Graham Phillips

“ In the quiet, beautiful room in upper Fifth Avenue was Dumont in his wine-colored wadded silk dressing-gown and white silk pajamas. The floor near his lounge was littered with the snake-like coils of ticker-tape. They rose almost to his knees as he sat and through telephone and ticker drank in the massacre of his making, glutted himself with the joy of the vengeance he was taking—on his enemies, on his false or feeble friends, on the fickle public that had trampled and spat upon him. His wet hair was hanging in strings upon his forehead. ”

“ To any man no decisive event of life is so absolutely unimportant as his own death. I never have wasted, and never shall waste, a moment in thinking of my death. It may concern others, but how does it concern me? When it comes I shall not be there. The death of another, however—that is cause for reflection, for sadness. I knew, as did no one else, how intensely Edna loved life, how in her own way of strain and struggle she enjoyed it. And to me it was pitiful, this spectacle of her sudden arrest, her sudden mortal peril, as she was about to achieve the summit of her ambition. ”

“ Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and "most men"—that he would feel that he was violating her were he to sweep her away in the arms of his impetuous released passion, as he knew he could. He felt that such a yielding was, after all, like the inert obedience of the leaf to the storm wind—that what he could compel, what women call love, would be as utterly without substance as an image in a mirror, indeed, would be a mere passive reflection of his own love—all most men want, but worthless to him. ”

“ But if they stay they do not wonder long. For the town in the bare winter is the real town the year round. The town of summer, tricked out in nature’s borrowed finery, is no more changed than was the jackdaw by his stolen peacock plumes. The smile, the gaiety, is on the surface. The prim, solemn old heart of Stoughton is as unmoved as when the frost is biting it.
In the first days of November Emily Bromfield, walking through the wretched streets under bare black boughs and a gray sky, had the full bitterness of her castaway life forced upon her. ”

“ This physical beauty had as an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms—of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves—tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. Susan, the interested in the world about her, Susan, the self-unconscious, had none of these tricks. She was at all times her own self. Beauty is anything but rare, likewise intelligence. ”

“ There are looks that paint upon the human countenance the whole of a life, as a flash of lightning paints upon the blackness of the night miles on miles of landscape. That look of Mrs. Ellersly's—stern disapproval at her daughter, stern command that she be more civil, that she unbend—showed me the old woman's soul. And I say that no old harpy presiding over a dive is more full of the venom of the hideous calculations of the market for flesh and blood than is a woman whose life is wrapped up in wealth and show. ”

“ Arkwright glanced from the parlor where he was sitting into the gloom of the open bathroom and back again. His cynical brown-green eyes paused upon a scatter of clothing, half-hiding the badly-rubbed red plush of the sofa—a mussy flannel nightshirt with mothholes here and there; kneed trousers, uncannily reminiscent of a rough and strenuous wearer; a smoking-jacket that, after a youth of cheap gayety, was now a frayed and tattered wreck, like an old tramp, whose "better days" were none too good. ”

“ In its stead there stood ready to receive the young man a woman of the type that possesses physical charm and knows how to use it—and does not scruple to use it. For a woman to conquer man by physical charm is far and away the easiest, the most fleeting and the emptiest of victories. But for woman thus to conquer without herself yielding anything whatsoever, even so little as an alluring glance of the eye—that is quite another matter. It was this sort of conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in—and sought to gain with any man who came within range. ”

“ And slowly she lifted her glance to mine; and never before had I felt the full glory of those eyes, the full melody of that deep voice.
And so, I end as I began, as life begins and ends—with a woman. In a woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span between—the business, profession, career—how colorless, how meaningless it would be but for her! ”

“ Susan, walking beside the homely Drumley, was a charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood. The year and three months in New York had wrought the same transformations in her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city life. She had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure. There was a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes. ”

“ As I look back on those weeks of days, each one crowded like a ragbag with rubbish, the figure of Edna stands out radiant. You would never have thought her the mother of the bride—or, indeed, a mother at all. A woman who for many years leads a virginal or almost virginal life gets back the vestal air of the unmarried girl. This air had returned to Edna. She had it as markedly as had Margot. It was most becoming to her piquant style of beauty, giving it the allure of the height that invites ascent and capture, yet has never been desecrated. ”

“ In winter no one could be deceived as to what living in Stoughton meant—living in it in the sense of being forced there from a city, forced to remain permanently.
But in summer, nature charitably lends Stoughton a corner of the gorgeous garment with which she adorns its country. The sun dries the muddy streets and walks, and the town slumbers in comfort under huge trees, whose leaves quiver with what seems to be the gentle joy of a quiet life. The boughs and the creepers conspire to transform hideous little houses into crystallised songs of comfort and content. ”

“ Scarborough had measured his task—to lift that convention from the slough of sordidness to which the wiles and bribes of Dumont and his clique had lured it; to set it in the highroad of what he believed with all his intensity to be the high-road of right. Usually he spoke with feeling strongly repressed; but he knew that if he was to win that day against such odds he must take those delegates by surprise and by storm, must win in a suddenly descended whirlwind of passion that would engulf calculation and craft, sordidness and cynicism. ”

“ The sound of an unconstrained voice, the sight of a believing face that did not express one or more of the shadings of contempt between pity and aversion—the sight and sound of this friend Tetlow was acting upon him like one of those secret, unexpected, powerful tonics which nature at times suddenly injects into a dying man to confound the doctors and cheat death. ”

“ There stood her grandmother—ebon staff in gloved hand—erect, spare body in rustling silk—gray-white hair massed before a sort of turban—steel-blue eyes flashing, delicate nostrils dilating with the breath of battle.
"Ah—Margaret!" said she, and her sharp, quarrel-seeking voice tortured the girl's nerves like the point of a lancet. "They tell me you have a headache." She lifted her lorgnon and scrutinized the pale, angry face of her granddaughter. "I see they were telling me the truth. You are haggard and drawn and distressingly yellow." ”

“ There had been a hopeful Susan, a sad but resolved Susan, a strong Susan, a weak Susan; there had been Susans who could not have shed a tear; there had been Susans who shed many tears—some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. ”

“ He was about to take her where his world would see her, where every inch of her would be subjected to the cruelest, most hostile criticism. One glance at her, and he knew a triumph awaited him. No man and no woman would wonder that he had lost his head over such beauty as hers. Hat and dress seemed just what had been needed to bring out the full glory of her charms.
"You are incredibly beautiful," he said in an awed tone. "I am proud of you."
A little color came into her cheeks. She looked at herself in the mirror with her quiet intense secret, yet not covert vanity. ”

“ Hargrave and his daughter-in-law drove to the railway station in the ancient and roomy phaeton which was to Saint X as much part of his personality as the aureole of glistening white hair that framed his majestic head, or as the great plaid shawl that had draped his big shoulders with their student stoop every winter day since anyone could remember. Despite his long exposure to the temptation to sink into the emasculate life of unapplied intellect, mere talker and writer, and to adopt that life's flabby ideals, he had remained the man of ideas, the man of action. ”

“ But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her mouth—mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly healthy and vital red. She had beauty, she had intelligence. But it was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh, with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss. ”

“ Just as her father had been missed and mourned more than many a father who deserved and received love, so now her mother, never deserving nor trying to deserve love, was missed and mourned as are few mothers who have sacrificed everything to their children. This fretful, self-absorbed invalid was all that Emily had in the world.
Wayland was startled when Emily threw herself into his arms and clinging close to him sobbed and wept on his shoulder. Sorrow often quickens into sympathy the meanest natures. The bereaved are amazed to find the world so strangely gentle for the time. ”

“ You may be imagining that, through all, Anita had been dominating my mind. That is the way it is in the romances; but not in life. No doubt there are men who brood upon the impossible, and moon and maunder away their lives over the grave of a dead love; no doubt there are people who will say that, because I did not shoot Langdon or her, or myself, or fly to a desert or pose in the crowded places of the world as the last scene of a tragedy, I therefore cared little about her. ”

“ We knew well the enchanted house where she lived—stately, retreated far into large grounds in Jefferson Street; a high brick wall all round, and on top of the wall broken glass set in cement. Behind that impassable barrier which so teased our young audacity were flower-beds and "shrub" bushes, whose blossoms were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean, strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once firm and soft beneath the feet. ”

“ There is the time when we hope, believing that we have altogether ceased to hope. That time had come for Susan. She seemed to think about the present. She moved about like a sleepwalker.
What women did she know—what men? She only dimly remembered from day to day—from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings—of rude contacts—of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten. ”

“ MR. CRAIG IN SWEET DANGER
It is a rash enterprise to open wide to the world the private doors of the family, to expose intimate interiors all unconscious of outside observation, and all unprepared for it. Such frankness tends to destroy "sympathetic interest," to make delusion and illusion impossible; it gives cynicism and his brother, pharisaism, their opportunity to simper and to sneer. Still rasher is it to fling wide the doors of a human heart, and, without any clever arrangement of lights and shades, reveal in the full face of the sun exactly what goes on there. ”

“ Such sounds, issuing from the humble—and not too clean—Wheatlands house gave it an atmosphere of aristocracy, put tone into the whole neighborhood, elevated the Wheatlands family like a paper collar on the calico shirt of a farm hand. If we look at ourselves rightly, we poor smattering seekers after a little showy knowledge of one kind or another—a dibble of French, a dabble of Latin or Greek, a sputter of woozy so-called philosophy—how like the paper-collared farm hand we are, how like the Hottentot chief with a plug hat atop his naked brown body. ”

“ Many a time he had pitied a woman for letting him get away from her, when she obviously wished to hold him and failed solely because she did not understand her business. Like every other man, he no sooner began to be attracted by a woman than he began to invest her with a mystery and awe which she either could dissipate by forcing him to see the truth of her commonplaceness or could increase into a power that would enslave him by keeping him agitated and interested and ever satisfied yet ever baffled. But no woman had shown this supreme skill in the art of love—until Dorothy Hallowell. ”

“ I am a man of the people, not afraid to be seen as the human being that I am. I laugh when I feel like it. I have no sense of jar when people call me “Matt.” I have a good time, and I shall stay young as long as I stay alive. Wealth hasn't made me a solemn ass, fenced in and unapproachable. The custom of receiving obedience and flattery and admiration has not made me a turkey-cock. Life is a joke; and when the joke's on me, I laugh as heartily as when it's on the other fellow. ”

“ But it is not her dress that most interests me, nor the luxury and perfection of all her surroundings. It is not even her beauty—that is, the whole of her beauty.
Everything and every being that is individual in appearance has some one quality, trait, characteristic, which stands out above all the rest to make a climax of interest and charm. With the rose it is its perfume; with the bird, perhaps the scarlet or snowy feathers upon its breast. Among human beings who have the rare divine dower of clear individuality the crown and cap of distinction differs. ”

“ It so happened that as he recognized Culver, Culver cast in the direction of the elevators the sort of look that betrays a man waiting for a woman. Unseen by Culver, Norman stopped short. Into his face blazed the fury of suspicion, jealousy, and hate—one of the cyclones of passion that swept him from time to time and revealed to his own appalled self the full intensity of his feeling, the full power of the demon that possessed him. Culver was of those glossy, black men who are beloved of women. ”

“ Beneath there was fear and respect—the fear and respect which those demoralized by unearned luxury and by the purposeless life always feel when faced by strength and self-reliance in the crises where externals avail no more than its paint and its bunting a warship in battle. She knew she had been treating him as no self-respecting man who knew the world would permit any woman to treat him. She knew her self-respect should have kept her from treating him thus, even if he, in his ignorance of her world and awe of it, would permit. ”

“ Emily did not enter, but went on to her own room—bare, cheerless, proofs of poverty and impending rags and patches threatening to obtrude. She looked out through the trees at the glimpses of the town—every beat of the pulse of her youth was a sullen and hateful protest against it. Beyond were the tall chimneys of the mills, with the black clouds from them smutching the sky—there lived the work-people, the boredom of the town driving them to brutal dissipation. ”

“ You, gentle reader, who know about as much of the science of managing men in practical life as you know of any other phase of the world-that-is—you, gentle reader, are shocked by my rudeness to a polite, well-educated, well-dressed Englishman. And you hope—and feel—that I overreached myself. But let me inform you—not for your instruction but for my own satisfaction—courtesy has to be used most sparingly. Human vanity is so monstrous that men eagerly read into politeness to them—the most ordinary politeness—evidence that their superiority is inspiring fear, awe and desire to conciliate them. ”

“ Susan's violet-gray eyes, growing grayer when she was thoughtful, growing deeper and clearer and softer shining violet when her emotions were touched—Susan's eyes were undoubtedly unusual even in a race in which homely eyes are the exception.
When it was her turn and she emerged into the glare of the footlights, she came to a full stop and an awful wave of weakness leaped up through legs and body to blind her eyes and crash upon her brain. She shook her head, lifted it high like a swimmer shaking off a wave. ”

“ Even Susan, the most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. The nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others, and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as the heat thawed them out—these sights and sounds together made up a truly infernal picture. ”

“ It was not quite dark yet; the air was almost July hot, as one of those prematurely warm days New York so often has in March. The sky, a soft and delicate blue shading into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them. Straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river—the broadest water Susan had ever seen—rose the mighty, the majestic city. It rose direct from the water. Endless stretches of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. ”

“ There is no more describing the effects of a harmonious combination of exquisite dress and exquisite woman than there is reproducing in words the magic and the thrill of sunrise or sunset, of moonlight's fanciful amorous play, or of starry sky. As the girl stood there, her eyes starlike with excitement, her lips crimson and sensuous against the clear old-ivory pallor of her small face in its frame of glorious dark hair, it seemed to him that her soul, more beautiful counterpart of herself, had come from its dwelling place within and was hovering about her body like an aureole. ”