Frederic Jesup Stimson

“ Bowdoin had to speak to him about it. He had no long absences at lunch-time, but took a sandwich on the street. In fact, Jamie had grown to be a miser.
Great things were happening in those days, but Jamie took no heed of them. Human liberty was in the air; love of man and love of law were at odds, and clashed with each other in the streets; Jamie took no heed of them. They jostled on the pavement, but Jamie walked to his task in the morning, and back at night, between them; seeing mankind but as trees, walking; bowed down with the love of one. ”

“ Our hero sank comfortably into the great old-fashioned bed, with a sigh of relief that he could sleep at last in peace. The broad windows were opened, and the moonlight lay across the lawn; and from it came the speech of insects, and of summer birds; far off, one whip-poor-will.
If anyone ever deserved sleep, he thought that he did; but this is not a world where we get our deserts. All night long he lay awake. His mind would go from his infatuation with the de Valska to his passion for poor Gladys Dehon; from the Exmoor hounds to his engagement with Miss Rutherford. ”

“ Left alone, Gracie’s smile, which had reflected Mamie’s, changed to a deeper look, a look that Mamie’s face could never mirror. Yes, it was a puzzle, in a way; people so rarely seemed to care for the essentials of things. Gracie’s notion of a man was enlightened heroism, of a woman perfect bravery and trust, and the light in the lives of both the light of the world that comes from another, like the sun’s. But to these young ladies and gentlemen, the light of the world was the light of a ball-room. ”

“ She opened the door and went into the house, leaving Vane on the threshold with a distinct impression that she was going to cry.
He walked along, mechanically, in the direction of his rooms, feeling his cheeks burn. That he had bungled—that he had committed a social gaucherie, he knew well enough; but what troubled him more than this was that he had given her real cause for offence, he had hurt her. If she could only know what pain this thought brought to him! Fool that he was, he had worn his clumsy, jejune mask of cynicism, and had not once shown to her his truer self. ”

“ Corporations are bad enough; it is one of the defects of the historical growth of law that the conditions which attend the birth of a legal idea so infinitely differ from those that make possible its greatest development; but the trust is to the corporation what the mitrailleuse is to a blunderbuss.
The “trust,” as the word is here employed, meaning by it a combination of property, real or personal, with powers of management or absolute disposal, or of stock in corporations, in the hands of a few persons, is a perfectly new device in the law. ”

“ The boys made fun of Tetherby; he bore it with a splendid smile and a twinkle in his ice-blue eye, until one day it went too far, and then he tackled the last offender and chucked him off the boat-house float into the river. He would have rowed upon the university crew, but that his digestion gave out; strong as he was in mind and body, nothing, that went for the nutrition and fostering of life, was well with him. Such men as he are repellent to the sane, and are willed by the world to die alone. ”

“ It has always been the custom of our ancestors to regulate the prices of wages by law, and the notion that it was either unconstitutional or inexpedient dates from a very few years back; yet all such attempts at legislation have utterly disappeared from any modern statute-book. In no State of our forty-six States is any one so unintelligent, even in introducing bills in the legislature, as to-day to propose that the price of a ton of coal or a loaf of bread shall be so much. Nor is any modern legislature so unintelligent or so oppressive as to propose sumptuary laws ”

“ And all the world seems thirst, and lust, and envy, and desire; the fires of heaven are put out, and all men struggling, trampling, for the colored stones of earth; and yet such blooms do come upon it. But they blossom stilly, like silent lilies born above the meadow-mire. White and pure they shine, and breathe in heaven’s sunlight, and give out heaven’s fragrance, borne each upon its slender stem above the blind, black bog.
The day after this, Gracie had an errand, up in a little town beyond the hills. Arthur asked that he might go there with her; then they both might ride instead of driving. ”

“ XVI. THIS was still the most marked flavor in his self-consciousness the next morning, and when he rode to the wharf, when he entered the cabin decked with flowers as if for a funeral, even when they steamed out to sea, the bitter aftertaste of folly did not leave him. He was in the mid-Atlantic before his self-communings began to be mitigated by his sense of humor. Truly there had been no need to consider quite so nicely his duties to Miss Thomas. He had thought himself too far involved to retreat gracefully without a proposal. ”

“ And it is an axiom that he who sees ever so little of a woman’s heart has but to take it. Seeing is possession. This is the wisdom of the fair Melusine, and other wise old mediæval myths.
It is needless to say that May had absolutely forgotten the Countess de Valska; more completely than even she had forgotten the Siberian mausoleum of her Serge. If May thought of her once in that year, it was to dismiss her memory with a curse for his own folly, and a mental oath that no Trouvillian countess would part him, should his way ever be clear to Gladys Darcy. ”

“ James Bowdoin, on coming down to the little office on the wharf rather later than usual, went up the stairs, more than ever choky with that spicy dust that was the mummy-like odor of departed trade, and divined that the cause thereof was in the counting-room itself, whence issued sounds of much bumping and falling, as if a dozen children were playing leap-frog on the floor. Jamie McMurtagh was seated on the stool in the outer den that was called the bookkeeper's, biting his pen, with even a sourer face than usual. ”

“ And he did not dream her eyes had been at the tower-window ever since. For their eyes never met.
But the people knew, and so they called her “Our Lady of the Tower.” And Nuestra Doña del Torre is she called there still. And thus they lived there alone within that great house, each for pity of the other in courage, each for awe of love in silence; each so loving, so brave, so silent, that the other never knew. ”

“ She had been selected to take part in the spectacle of the evening, the much-envied fancy-dress minuet, after supper, that was to open the cotillon; and she wore the rich red brocades of a Louis Quinze court-dress, her dense hair powdered white, and from this mass of blazing color rose haughtily the regal neck and head, and the proud shoulders, and beneath the white masses of her hair her eyes burned deeply, like two violet stars. A sort of hush of admiration had attended her wherever she went that evening; and Haviland had heard men call her the beauty of the ball. ”