Elizabeth Robins

“ One woman's mishap?—what is that? A thing as trivial to the great world as it's sordid in most eyes. But the time has come when a woman may look about her, and say, "What general significance has my secret pain? Does it 'join on' to anything?" And I find it does. I'm no longer merely a woman who has stumbled on the way. I'm one (she controls with difficulty the shake in her voice) who has got up bruised and bleeding, wiped the dust from her hands and the tears from her face, and said to herself not merely, "Here's one luckless woman! ”

“ Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set up among the rocks.
He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution redoubled.
With horror he remembered that old pastime—rolling the rocks down. How they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness? ”

“ So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate—that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London.
Who would help me to find mine?—or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead!
Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking. ”

“ While to the onlooker nearly every aspect of this particular young woman would seem destined to offend a beauty-loving, critical taste like that of Borrodaile, he was probably served, as other mortals are, by that philosophy of the senses which brings in time a deafness and a blindness to the unloveliness that we needs must live beside. Lord Borrodaile was far too intelligent not to see, too, that when people had got over Lady Sophia's uncompromising exterior, they found things in her to admire as well as to stand a little in awe of. ”

“ From the depths of the store-box whereon his master had sat, Nig darted, howling excitedly and waving a muddy tail like a draggled banner, saying in Mahlemeut: "The ice is going out! The fish are coming in." All the other dogs waked and gave tongue, running in and out among the huddled rows of people gathered on the Ramparts.
Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the Yukon—noise not loud, but deep—an undercurrent of heavy sound. As they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to move. ”

“ Faint pleasure, dim regret—she kept the light and the shadow alike inside her eyes; nothing ever overflowed the long-fringed margins of those wells of darkness.
She had learned at last that when Bellucci was with her she must lay aside her fantastic work. As he sat moodily smoking, surreptitiously watching her listless hands and far-away eyes, she would sometimes rise and carry a little inlaid table over to the south window of the tower, and lay out the patience cards, her only other occupation. ”

“ So good for Julian!
At dinner Napier had almost pointedly ignored Miss Ellis. She must talk to Julian. But by no canon of friendship could Napier be asked not to have a little fun out of the spectacle. It ministered too temptingly (especially with Miss Greta opposite) to that sense of the ludicrous which other people's emotional adventures are apt to inspire in us. And the more acutely and exquisitely is this pleasure provided if either of the "parties" has hitherto neglected or been deprived of this element in human experience. Not to know the ropes is to provide amusement to the old salt. ”

“ I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."
I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows—a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. ”

“ It was plain, from Ernestine's face, she was not going to let the meeting break up on that note.
'Don't you think it a little strange, considering the well-known chivalry among men—don't you think it strange that against no reform the world has ever seen——?'
'Reform! Wot rot!'
'If you don't admit it's reform, call it revolt!' She threw the red-hot word out among the people as if its fire scorched her. 'Against no revolt has there ever been such a torrent of ridicule let loose as against the Women's Movement. ”

“ If it had been anything else in all the world!—and he fell to laying plans for entrapping her proud reserve into confession of other dreams and dearer longings, that he, in satisfying them, might conjure back the light in those lamps of Italy. For, true hedonist as he was, Bellucci was at times quite as ready as more generous men to brighten his own way by the reflected radiance of another’s pleasure. ”

“ They did the impossible—they made room, and turned back the buffalo-skin. Only the big Colonel, who was most in the way of all, sat, not stirring, staring in the fire. Such a look on the absent, tender face as the great masters, the divinest poets cannot often summon, but which comes at the call of some foolish old nursery jingle, some fragment of half-forgotten folk-lore, heard when the world was young—when all hearing was music, when all sight was "pictures," when every sense brought marvels that seemed the everyday way of the wonderful, wonderful world. ”

“ To the unnautical mind, the shortened ray seemed to draw the lifeboat in and in, till the conning-tower stood clear to the straining eye; in and in, till to the right of the main origin of light dim figures took shape; in and in, till just before the oarsmen had brought the lifeboat alongside the shelving body, topped with its low deck, suddenly the light ray was extinguished. Lifeboat and submarine swung an instant in an equal blackness. Out of it a voice, again in those strange accents. No answer till an English tongue spoke from the lifeboat, "We can understand a little German." ”

“ Just in front of where Miss Levering and her satellite first came to a standstill, was a cheerful, big, sandy man with long flowing moustachios, a polo cap, and a very dirty collar. At intervals he inquired of the men around him, in a great jovial voice, 'Are we down-'earted?' as though the meeting had been called, not for the purpose of rousing interest in the question of woman's share in the work of the world, but as though its object were to humiliate and disfranchise the men. ”

“ He shut his eyes, and lo! the design of Alicia, a tapestry, in waves of color, was painted all across the dark!
Night after night he struggled with the vision, finding, as people with imagination may, that in the obscure chambers of the brain form and color can be either noble stimulant or deadly poison. No wise man has yet come from the East, or from the West, to give us any measure of the power these things have to lift up or to make sick the spirit. To Bellucci the pattern growing so swiftly under the cold, white fingers was a design of inane cunning to express Bewilderment—hopeless—stark! ”

“ Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or—mercifully—more than a pale reflection of past Despair. ”

“ Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too, but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.
"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I ever—" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some of the glitter of the sea. ”

“ Those who, in spite of warning, ventured in hip-boots down on the Never-Know-What, found that, in places, the under side of the ice was worn nearly through. If you bent your head and listened, you could plainly hear that greater music of the river running underneath, low as yet, but deep, and strangely stirring—dominating in the hearer's ears all the clear, high clamour from gulch and hill.
In some men's hearts the ice "went out" at the sound, and the melting welled up in their eyes. Summer and liberty were very near.
"Oh, hurry, Yukon Inua; let the ice go out and let the boats come in." ”

“ The woman bent over the crowd. Nothing misty in her eyes now—rather a keener light than before.
'Don't you see,' she appealed to them as equals—'don't you see that in your improvement of the world you men have taken women's business out of her home? In the old days there was work and responsibility enough for woman without going outside her own gate. The women were the bakers and brewers, the soap and candle-makers, the loom-workers of the world. You men,' she said, delicately flattering them, 'you have changed all that. You have built great factories and warehouses and mills. ”

“ Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much right has a man to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he hadn't any such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of Abergarry. ”

“ Would he come to fear the lifting of his eyelids, lest he should see by sunlight or by moonlight patterned across the sky this design to turn men’s brains? As he stood there he fell into trembling, for albeit his eyes were closed he saw the vision still—only clearer, with more color and more motion—as he had seen it in Alicia’s arras when it seemed to rock the tower—as he had seen it through many an hour of the night, painted on the dark. ”

“ As the white men waited for boats to-day, the men of the older time had waited for the salmon—for those first impatient adventurers that would force their way under the very ice-jam, tenderest and best of the season's catch, as eager to prosecute that journey from the ocean to the Klondyke as if they had been men marching after the gold boom. ”