Jr. Thomas Dixon

“ His eye rested on a life-size portrait of Nan done by the foremost artist of Europe. It filled the entire space above the great mantel reaching to the ceiling and so skilfully had it been set in the massive panel one seemed to be looking through an opening into another room—the figure was not a picture but the living woman about to extend her hand in friendly greeting to her guests.
The artist had caught the secret of her character and expressed it with genius in the poise of the superb form, the incarnation of sensuous soulless beauty dominated by keen intelligence. ”

“ All he had to do to-night was to apply the law of self-interest by which this man had lived and waxed mighty, and to-morrow he could take the woman be loved in his arms, move into his palace its master and hers. There could be no mistake about Nan's feelings. He had read the yearning of her heart with unerring insight. Visions of a life of splendour, beauty and power with her by his side swept his imagination. A sense of fierce, exultant triumph filled his soul. But most alluring of all whispered joys was the dream of their love-life. ”

“ We are born in lies, grow up in lies, live and move and have our being in lies. Our highest wisdom is the law of hypocrisy which we call diplomacy. I've found that society is one living lie. We say 'good morning' and wish we could murder the man we greet. We say 'call again' and wish it may be never. We live two lives or we don't live at all—one outward and visible, the other secret. We must be true to one and laugh at the other. I'm growing sick of lies!"
Stuart looked at her flushed face with a deepening thrill of the drama of the soul its quick changing expression shadowed. ”

“ Harriet found to her joyous surprise her dressing room transformed into a bower of roses. A great bouquet of three dozen American beauties on her table bore her father's name and all the rest were from Stuart. She had a vague surmise that he paid for her father's, too. Every tint of rose that blooms he had sent, hiring an artist to arrange them so that their colouring made a veritable song of joy as she entered. There was no card to indicate who had sent these wonderful flowers, but she knew. There was only one man on earth who loved her well enough. ”

“ I've the right to live my own life. We must each of us choose our world, the one of conventions and shams or the big one that's beyond—the world of reality, where free men and women live and work in freedom while youth and daring lead the way."
She paused and Stuart's lips parted in amazement. Never had he heard such eloquence from the woman before him. Words leaped from her heart, quivering with emotion, her whole being stirred to its depths.
"Jim," she went on falteringly, "I'm lonely and heartsick. I'm trying to tell you that I want your love; that I can't live any longer without it." ”

“ The man I love must be rich. Oh, Jim, you shall be! Wealth is the only road now from the vulgar crowd—the only way to climb on top."
"But, suppose I don't wish to climb on the top of people?"
"You can't be such a fool!"
"But suppose I am? Money is the most obvious sign of success in a new crude world. Ours is no longer new, no longer crude or isolated. True civilization has always placed manhood above money. The only names in our history worth remembering—are there, because they did something else than make money. Washington was the richest man in America in his day. ”

“ One by one the mighty fall and are forgotten and yet that crowd grows denser, its feet swifter, and the pressure of its united life becomes more and more resistless. A hundred years from now and your name will have vanished from human memory. A millionaire dies every day. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Is such a life at its best worth living? And yours is never at its best. You can't eat much. You don't sleep well and you can't live beyond fifty-five."
Bivens's dark face grew suddenly pale and his slender fingers touched one of the piles of gold. ”

“ This house is mine because I have built it as a work of love and art and expressed myself in it with infinite tenderness and infinite pains. It is not a palace in size, but it is a palace, glorious and wonderful, in a deeper spiritual sense, because it is a poem. Every spar of wood in it is perfect of its kind. Every stone in it is a gem because it is the right thing in the right place. There isn't a shoddy bit of material or a slipshod piece of work from the green tile in its roof to the stone boulders on which it rests. It will last our lives and generations to follow. ”

“ Surely his like had never been seen in the history of man—this modern money-maniac, this strange creature of iron muscles, always hurrying, daring, scheming, plotting, with never a moment's relaxation, day or night, eating or drinking, working or sleeping, in his office or in his home, going or coming in his yacht with wireless tower, his private car with telegraph office, his secretary always by his side, a telephone always at his bed, with no time to live, no time to love, with only time to fight and kill and pile the spoils of war on high! ”

“ I believe the reason why the spirit grows savage and we forget that we are human here so often is that we never see the sun or moon. We never hear the stir of wings in the sky, feel the throb of Nature's heart in the ebb and flow of tides, or walk with our heads among the stars."
Harriet sat in thoughtful silence a while and a curious searching look crept into her eyes as she softly asked:
"You have seen much of Mr. Bivens lately, Jim—I've wondered if you have never yet looked your dead love in the face?" ”

“ The glitter of your millions once blinded me and I was on the point of surrender, but I've won out. I've entered at last—to stay—into the Kingdom of Mind, that lies beyond the rule of greed, where beauty, heroism, and genius have built their altar-fires and keep them burning. You'll have to come with me, Nan, into this enchanted land. Your estate is large only if you don't lift up your head and look farther. You own a hundred thousand acres in the mountains, and yet, after all, it's but a tiny speck on the horizon of one little corner of a state. ”

“ Stuart drew the curtains of scarlet and gold, touched a spring and raised the massive broad window. The death-chamber was flooded with fresh balmy air and dazzling sunlight. All that was left of him who boasted his mastery of the world lay on the magnificent bed, a lump of white cold flesh and projecting bones. The little body looked stark and hideous in the sunlight.
The reporters down stairs were prying into his affairs like so many ferrets to find out how much he left. One of them asked Stuart his opinion. ”

“ Opportunity means one thing to me—quite another to Bivens. The world he lives in is a small one. I live in God's big world. I belong to no class. I know them all from the lonely multimillionaire on Murray Hill to his equally lonely brother thief who crawls into his lair by the river. And I don't envy one more than another. My business is to heal the sick, not merely to make money. Thousands of children die at my very door every summer who could be saved by a single prescription if they could get it. ”

“ After all in this modern passion for money might there not be something deeper than mere greed; perhaps the regenerating power of the spirit pressing man upward? Certainly he could only see the bright side of it to-night and the wonder grew on him that he had lived for twenty-five years in a fog of sentiment and ignored deliberately the biggest fact of the century, while the simpler mind of the poor white boy in Bivens had grasped the truth at once and built his life squarely on it from the beginning. ”

“ As if she didn't know that the career of any woman was immeasurably grander than that of any man—if she fulfil her destiny that links her to God in the creation of a child—a being whose simple word may mould a million wills and change the fate of centuries—and yet she had deliberately strangled her soul and chosen this little pig, who rooted in the dirt for gold, to be the father of her children. ”

“ Man must choose, otherwise his deeds have no meaning. A deed of mine is good merely because I have the power to do its opposite if I choose. In this free world step by step I can rise or fall through suffering and choosing."
"Oh, Jim," Nan broke in softly, "I've made you suffer horribly. You have the right to be hard and bitter."
"But I'm not, Nan," was the quiet answer. "I've been made generous and warm and tender by disappointment. Through the gates of pain I've entered into fellowship with my fellow-men, the humblest and the greatest. This sense of kinship has given me a larger vision. ”

“ He repeated these resolutions over and over before reaching the Bivens mansion only to find that he had lost all sense of danger in the warmth and tenderness of Nan's greeting. He not only forgot his fears but reproached himself for his low estimate of her character in supposing that she would allow herself or permit him to cross the line of danger. Her solicitude for Bivens seemed deep and genuine.
"For Heaven's sake, Jim," she begged, "try to cheer him up. He has grown to feel that you are the only real friend he has ever known." ”