David Graham Phillips

“ Tetlow and Miss Hallowell were going out—evidently to lunch together. She was looking up at the chief clerk with laughing eyes—they seemed coquettish to the infuriated Norman. And Tetlow—the serious and squab young ass was gazing at her with the expression men of the stupid squab sort put on when they wish to impress a woman. At this spectacle, at the vision of that slim young loveliness, that perfect form and deliciously smooth soft skin, white beyond belief beneath its faintly golden tint—the hot blood steamed up into Norman's brain, blinded his sight, reddened it with desire and jealousy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But such is the frailty of human nature—or so savage the pressure of the need of the material necessities of civilized life, let a profession become profitable or develop possibilities of profit—even the profession of statesman, even that of lawyer—or doctor—or priest—or wife—and straightway it begins to tumble down toward the brawl and stew of the market place.
In a last effort to rouse the gentleman in Norman or to shame him into pretense of gentlemanliness, Lockyer expostulated with him like a prophet priest in full panoply of saintly virtue. ”

“ About the time that the ordinary plausible excuses for Norman's neglect, his abstraction, his seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine's vanity came forward to explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour approached—so vanity assured her—the man who loved her as her complex soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A large income, fashionable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a maid—these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and soul. ”

“ First he must live that glorious life of youth, of nerves aquiver with ecstasy. Also, he must shut out the things of the intellect—must live in brain as well as in body the animal life—in brain the life of cunning and strategy. For the intellectual life would make it impossible to pursue such ignoble things. First, material success and material happiness. Then, in its own time, this intellectual life to which such men as Hallowell ever beckon, from their heights, such men as Norman, deep in the wallow that seems to them unworthy of them, even as they roll in it. ”

“ There is no more trying test of a personality than to be estimated by the voice alone. That test produces many strange and startling results. Again and again it completely reverses our judgment of the personality, either destroys or enhances its charm. The voice of this girl, floating out upon the quiet of the cottage—the voice, soft and sweet, full of the virginal passion of dreams unmarred by experience—It was while listening to her voice, as he stood there in the dimly lighted hall, that Frederick Norman passed under the spell in all its potency. ”

“ She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the sex he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the vanity of her class—the comfortable class that feels superior to the mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social rank—and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human under such a weight as this. ”

“ I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than ever man was before." His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way. But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will give—how much you will love—I've felt it from the second time I saw you—perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me as you do—who drew me as you do—against my ambition—against my will. ”

“ He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that, far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and well-balanced mentality—a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to soaring.
Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little about ourselves, less about others. ”

“ There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated—until one reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. ”

“ It looks like snobbishness to me—false pride—silly false pride."
"It is snobbishness," said Norman. "But you forget that snobbishness rules the world. The way to rule fools is to make them respect you. And the way to make them respect you is by showing them that they are your inferiors. I want Galloway's respect because I want his money. And I'll not get his money—as much of it as belongs to me—except by showing him my value. Not my value as a lawyer, for he knows that already, but my value as a man. Do you see?"
"No, I don't," snapped Tetlow. ”

“ Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the day—about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics, but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change all that—and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life—those realizations of ideas compel. ”

“ Just as the literal truth about his success was far from being altogether to his credit, so the literal truth as to his fall gave him little of the vesture of the hero, and that little ill fitting, to cover his naked humanness. Let him who has risen to material success altogether by methods approved by the idealists, let him who has fallen from on high with graceful majesty, without hysterical clutchings and desperate attempts at self-salvation in disregard of the safety of others—let either of these superhuman beings come forward with the first stone for Norman. ”

“ In spite of himself Tetlow was falling under the spell of Norman's personality, of the old and deep admiration the lesser man had for the greater.
"Norman," he said, "how can you be such a combination of bigness and petty deviltry? You are a monster of self-indulgence. It's a God's mercy there aren't more men with your selfishness and your desires."
Norman laughed sardonically. "The difference between me and most men," said he, "isn't in selfishness or in desires, but in courage. Courage, Billy—there's what most of you lack. And even in courage I'm not alone. ”

“ We fancy that the world and the human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be. History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman, practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of the future and working only for it—but he soon came to think him a divine fool. ”

“ He went on to the house, Pat walking beside him and chattering on and on—a stream of words Norman did not hear. As he entered the open front door Dorothy came down the stairs. He had thought he knew how white her skin was. But he did not know until then. And from that ghostly pallor looked the eyes of grief beyond tears. He advanced toward her. But she seemed to be wrapped in an atmosphere of aloofness. He felt himself a stranger and an alien. After a brief silence she said: "I don't realize it. I've been upstairs where Pat carried him—but I don't realize it. It simply can't be." ”

“ With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning umbrellas inside out, tossing women's skirts about their heads, reducing all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and sullen wretchedness. Norman's limousine was waiting at the curb. ”

“ For certain it is that the human animal when healthy and well fed is invariably peaceable and kindly and tolerant—up to the limits of selfishness, and even encroaching upon those limits.
Of writing rubbish about love and passion there is no end—and will be no end until the venerable traditional nonsense about those interesting emotions shares the fate that should overtake all the cobwebs of ignorance thickly clogging the windows and walls of the human mind. ”

“ Don't you see it in me, Fred? I'm not a fool. Yet see what a fool I act."
"Spoiled child—that's all. No self-control."
"You despise everyone who isn't as strong as you." She looked at him intently. "I wonder if you are as self-controlled as you imagine. Sometimes I wish you'd get a lesson. Then you'd be more sympathetic. But it isn't likely you will—not through a woman. Oh, they're such pitifully easy game for a man like you. But then men are the same way with you—quite as easy. You get anything you want. . . . You're really going to stick to Josephine?" ”