Guy Wetmore Carryl

“ It’s like the most inviting dishes served up by one’s chef: if we had the dangerous curiosity to pry into all the stages of their preparation, I doubt if very many of them would stand the test and prove so tempting, after all. That’s the way with a man. When he brings us his love, we have to accept it, without inquiring too closely how it has come to be. ”

“ There are only a few delusions left, and love’s not one of them — more’s the pity! The best flowers, Margery — and I grant you love is one of the very best — are brought to perfection by methods which it’s not always pleasant to follow in detail. ”

“ The stillness was emphasized rather than disturbed by a tiny tinkle of water, falling from ledge to ledge of a rockery hidden in the trees, and the sound, hardly less liquid, of a nightingale, rehearsing, pianissimo, snatches of the melody that midnight would hear in full. The darkness seemed to drip perfume: for the little seats and summer-houses, cunningly hidden here and there among the bosquets, were veritable bowers of roses, and the new grass and foliage had that fresh June smell which July, with its dust and scorching suns, so soon turns stale. ”

“ Through the windows of the west wing, open from floor to ceiling to the soft night air, the big dining-table gleamed with linen, silver, and crystal, in not ungraceful disarray, and above it hung a thin haze of blue-gray smoke, through which the shirt-bosoms and white waistcoats of the men stood oddly out, seeming to have no relation to their owners, whose faces were cut off by the deep-red candle-shades from the light, and so from the view of those outside. ”

“ You won’t think me vain if I say all men can’t be Jeremy Carnbys? When they know how to love, more often than not it’s because they’ve learned; and as to how they learned, it’s for our own good not to be too inquisitive. Usually, my dear, it means another woman, and not a woman one would be apt to call upon, at that.”
“Mrs. Carnby!”
“Yes. Don’t be provincial, Margery. I’ve no patience with the whitewash business. It’s better at all times to look things squarely in the face, even if doing so makes — er — your eyes water! ”

“ I’ve lived in Paris only a little while, but long enough to know that when one says ‘boys will be boys’ it sometimes means — oh, more than putty-blowers, and coming indoors with wet feet, and pulling out the parrot’s tail-feathers! ”

“ She’s been the method of preparing the dish, that’s all, the fertilizer which has made the rose of love possible. She has taught the man what neither you nor any girl in the least like you could teach him — the things which are not worth while! We get the better part. She has burned up the chaff. We get the wheat.”
Margery had tightly locked her hands. ”

“ I’m different from these other women, who can laugh at such things, and gloss them over, and forget them. I demand of the man who asks me to marry him the selfsame thing that he demands of me. I demand that he shall be pure! ”

“ There’s hardly a woman happily married to-day who hasn’t been preceded, and rather profitably preceded, I venture to say, by another woman — and not a very good woman either. She’s there in the background, but we have to ignore her, and by the time we notice her at all it’s more than likely she has ceased to be important. ”

“ You don’t want me to be only the whim of a man’s changed fancy, the thing on which he practises all he has learned from — from—”
“I would to Heaven I could make a man fit for you!” answered Mrs. Carnby, drawing the girl close to her, “but, since I can’t do that, I want you to see things in their true light, and to learn that charity begins in the same place which is called a woman’s sphere, and that love, from her standpoint, is little more than forgiveness on the endless instalment plan!”
“But Andrew—” said Margery eagerly.
“Andrew Vane is only a man,” said Mrs. ”