Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ And with her entrance our movie melodrama became, at once, the tragedy of beauty and dignity and poignant repression.
She was draped in some sort of flowing dressing-gown that made her appear matronly and classical. Her hair had been hastily gathered up in a coiled disorder high on her head. She came in from the darkness to our light noiselessly, and found him with a slow, set look that pitied him and suffered for him and stood firm. It was a look of irrevocable judgment and unmerciful compassion; and it made her most movingly beautiful to see. ”

“ The daughter of the stuffed-heart aristocracy and poor Con Gorman, the ne'er-do-well, had both arrived at their distinguished goals by following the impractical bypaths which Centerbrook—in the person of the coal-yard proprietor—had so despised. Life has a way of playing such little jokes upon the wisdom of the too practical. ”

“ The Furnesses had, that day, moved into their half of the house; it had been for some time vacant, and a missing board had not yet been replaced in the fence that made the rear wall of the woodshed. Con, straightening up from the kindling in order to cram a cooky into his mouth, saw her watching him through this hole in the fence with an expression of hungry envy. He grinned and held out a cooky to her. She studied him between shyness and temptation. ("They never had enough to eat in the house," he explained, "but they were so proud you'd never guess it.") ”

“ The sense of his unhappiness beside me, the sound of the dance-music from behind us, the sight of the desolate tennis-courts vaguely in front of us, the taste of the cold cigarette in my mouth— Life has such aspects. They are intolerable. The mind cannot endure them. ”

“ I made a strategic retreat from the labor war in the Pennsylvania coal-fields and moved toward her with the current that was being sucked in to the music. It seemed impossible that Con could have told her what I had said about his acting. Why should he? And yet why, otherwise, should she summon me in this way? And—most of all—why the look that she had shot at him? What was going on between them?
When I had been recognized and greeted by her mother and her she said that she wanted me to meet Lieutenant Williamson. That was pleasant but unilluminating. The lieutenant was equally so. ”

“ And the commuter—living in Centerbrook because "New York is no place to bring up a young family"—regards the native Centerbrooker as the summer visitor in the Catskills regards the buckwheater and the local village life, or as any one who is progressively transient regards the permanent and rooted. Humanity, as the philosopher says, is "like that." It is one of humanity's compensations for being so human.
Con Gorman was in the rooted camp because his father kept the bakery on Front Street, near the railway station. ”

“ I was confused by a vague recollection of a report that Con had said he was fired for refusing to give a customer short weight. Centerbrook is full of such gossip about its shopkeepers. It is the way the impotent commuter takes his revenge on the high cost of living. I avoided looking at the coal-man.
Flora Furness caught my wandering eye, across the veranda, and she gave me not exactly a smile, but at least a facial movement of friendly recognition. Her mother had discovered that I had once visited a member of the artist colony in Amberley, which is beside the river Arun, opposite Bury ”

“ But, as a matter of fact, neither the Germans nor the Furnesses were spiritually at home in the tents of their respective factions. They were only more antipathetic to each other than they were to their economic kind. Nothing in the newspapers could have sounded less likely to Centerbrook than the possibility that a daughter of the Furnesses would ever look twice at a son of the Germans. The head-line, "Screen Star Weds Peeress," would not have puckered many mouths in Centerbrook. But "Con Gorman Weds Flora Furness"! ”

“ Cuthbert Williamson, of the Atlantic Squadron.
And my coal magnate referred to the Furnesses as "the stuffed-heart aristocracy" because they were known to be as poor as they were considered "snooty." They had no motor-car. They kept no servants. They were such notoriously "slow pay" that they could not get credit even at the news-stand on the railway platform when they were in a hurry to catch a train. They never entertained. The butcher reported that they bought chiefly beef hearts (hence the stuffed-heart aristocracy) . ”

“ He lasted longest at the soda-fountain, because the Furnesses had not the American weaknesses for cold drinks and proprietary medicines. The apparent cheerfulness of his irresponsibility was a humorous Irish mask for his distaste for commercial drudgery and the growing unhappiness of his divided life. He flung out impatiently against a situation which only the most deadly application of industry could have cured.
When he tried working in New York he was away from her all day ”

“ I might as well have tried to think in a Bellevue ambulance, with a patient on the way to the psychopathic ward. He had gone from a frenzy of despair to an insane height of voluble hope. Certainly he would make a great actor if temperament could do it.
I left him in the car when I got out at the druggist's to telephone. ”

“ That had happened on the club-house veranda, just a few minutes before I spoke to him. It was the cause of his excessive emotion at my offer of assistance. It was the reason why he had tried to get a dance with her, and waylaid her when he saw me with her, and followed us to demand of her, "Are you going to marry him?"
She had refused to say that she was not. She had admitted that she was probably going to England with Howard and her parents. "We're needed. We're all needed," she kept saying. "And what's the use of my staying here? I'm only ruining your life."
"And she's not!" Con cried. ”

“ It is too rare to be overlooked. When the concert, was finished and the room was being cleared for the dance I hunted him out in the crowd on the club-house veranda and proposed that he should let me give him a letter to a playwright who, I knew, was in need of a juvenile. ”

“ She believes what her mother tells her. She's always doing things because her mother— She should 've— When I wanted her to— When I had a job in New York in that big clothing-store I wanted her to beat it and get married, and she wouldn't. ”

“ I suspected that Con would be about as glad to see me as to see the coal-proprietor from Leedy Street, and my suspicion was accurate. He was entirely polite, at his ease, and unselfconscious, but he scarcely looked at me. He kept his eyes almost constantly on his wife. ”

“ I suspect that the "some one" who saw this was a younger Gorman, spying through a crack in the closed shutters of the Furness front window. They lived under a common roof—the Germans and the Furnesses—in the old Voss house, on the corner of High and Leedy streets, the Furnesses having a front door on High Street and the Gormans using what had once been a side door and veranda on Leedy. ”

“ Conrad Norman Secretly Married to Sir Cuthbert Williamson's Widow
Conrad Norman, popular star of the Domino Film Company, and Lady Flora Williamson, widow of Sir Cuthbert Williamson, late of the British navy and who was killed in the Jutland battle, were married by the Rev. Simon G. Montague, in St. Agatha's Episcopal Church, upper Broadway, last Tuesday afternoon, it was learned yesterday. Lady Williamson is the only ”

“ I think I'd better go into town with you to-morrow and introduce you to these people. They want to start rehearsals right away, and I'd like you to get a copy of your part and run over it with you. A good deal will depend on the first impression they get of you. ”