George A. Birmingham

“ I cannot imagine anything more annoying to a respectable, steady-going word than to be called upon suddenly to undertake work to which it is not accustomed. The domestic housemaid is perfectly right in resisting any effort to make her do new kinds of work. ”

“ The word, though common on our side of the Atlantic now, was at that time peculiar to the American language.
“Cinematographs?” I said. “I’ve seen them of course. You have them in your circus, haven’t you, as part of the show?”
“Yes. That’s what set me thinking about them. I’ve always felt that the next step in perfecting the cinematograph would be doing away with the screen, putting the figures on the stage, that is to say reflections of them, so that they would actually move about backwards and forwards instead of on a flat surface. You understand?” ”

“ Why should words be worse treated than housemaids? It is the business of “artist” to stand for the man who paints pictures in oils. “Blasphemy” describes aggravated breaches of the third commandment. What right had Mrs. Ascher or any one else to press them into new services? There ought to be a strong trade union among words.
“And now,” said Tim, “she says I’m not an artist after all because I want to make movies more real. ”

“ That was all I could do for Tim Gorman. I do not think that he deserved more than cold comfort and disagreeable advice. I might have given him, or lent him, a little money, if he had been at work on a really useful invention, something which would benefit humanity. There are lots of such things waiting to be invented. There ought to be some way of stabbing a man who insists on ringing you up on the telephone at unreasonable hours and saying tiresome things. ”

“ Ascher apparently laps up patriotic sentiment with loud purrs. That may be why Gorman likes her. The next thing I mean to ask him is what he means by patriotism. I can understand quite easily what Irish patriotism meant ten years ago. Gorman’s friends wanted my land, a definite, tangible thing. I wanted it myself. But now they have got the land, and yet Gorman goes on talking patriotism. It is not as if he had no sense of humour. Gorman sees the absurdity of the things he says just as plainly as I do. The ridiculous side of his own enthusiasm is never long absent from his consciousness ”

“ The world will pay anything, absolutely anything to the man who provides it with a new torture. It’s an odd twist in human nature—though I don’t know why I should say that. Oddness is really the normal thing in human nature.”
“But I want a thousand dollars,” said Tim, “or five hundred dollars at the very least. I must try experiments.”
“If you ask your brother——” I said.
“Michael isn’t nice to me about it,” said Tim. “He isn’t nice at all. When I asked him for a thousand dollars he said he’d get it for me on condition that I allowed him to manage my cash register in his own way. ”

“ Ascher. He is not in love with her. We Irish have not many virtues, but we can boast that we seldom make love to other men’s wives. Besides, Mrs. Ascher is not the kind of woman who allows strange men to make love to her. She is, in essentials, far less emancipated than she thinks. It is just possible that he finds her responsive to his fondness for the more flamboyant kinds of rhetoric. Gorman really likes talking about Ireland as an oppressed and desolated land. ”

“ A slight irregularity in drying and a hero becomes a clown. The case of ‘Imperial Cæsar dead and turned to clay’ is not so bad as that of an idealist whose neck has cracked.”
“I’m dreadfully disappointed in that boy,” said Mrs. ”