May Sinclair

“ How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness on an afternoon when you have nothing better to do and they reward you with the devotion of eternity; for they have no sense of proportion. The awkward thing is that it lays you under an eternal obligation to do something or other for them, you don't know exactly what; an intolerable position for a nice man.
So Durant's first feelings were surprise, annoyance, and a certain shame. Then he began to feel a little flattered, being perfectly sure that Frida Tancred was not the woman to give herself away to any ordinary man. ”

“ Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has lifted the body at resurrection time. ”

“ And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now.
That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coarsely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of damnable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. ”

“ So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm. It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal effort not to be.
He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire her courage. That uncompromising attitude was more dignified than the hesitations of weaker natures. ”

“ She went on dreamily, as if speaking more to herself than him. "To have power over your life—to do what you like with it—take it up or throw it down, to fling it away if that seems the best thing to do. You're not fit to take up your life if you haven't the strength to put it down, too."
"Frida, if you were my wife you wouldn't have to put it down. I'm not asking you to give up the world for me; I'm not even asking you to give up one day of your life. Your life would be exactly what it is now—plus one thing. ”

“ She took her excitements, lawful or otherwise, vicariously in the doomed and dedicated persons of her friends. Brocklebank knew it. Blond, spectacled, middle-aged, and ponderous, he regarded his wife's performances and other people's with a leniency as amazing as her own. He was hovering about old Lady Paignton in the background, where Straker could see his benignant gaze resting on Furnival and Mrs. Viveash.
"Poor dears," said Fanny, as if in extenuation of her tolerance, "they are enjoying themselves."
"So are you," said Straker.
"I like to see other people happy. Don't you?" ”

“ They say that passion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. But Frida's had shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal; and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole. Other women before Frida had loved the world too well; but for them the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. For Frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. ”

“ He swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters—neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. There's an attitude for you!
"That attitude is my Munshi, and my Munshi is Asia."
He smiled. He had seen Frida in many attitudes, Frida in love with nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing. Here was Frida in love with an idea. ”

“ Mrs. Fazakerly shrugged her shoulders ever so little. "That drawing-room—did you ever see anything like it? And such possibilities in it, too. I can't bear to think of all those beautiful things wasted, just for want of a little taste, a little arrangement—the right touch."
The widow's white fingers twitched. It was not vulgar cupidity; it was the passion of the born genius, of the lover of art for art's sake, who sees his opportunity given into the hands of an inferior. If only she had the ordering, the decoration of Coton Manor! ”

“ Only when she lit her lamp in her room, and received the full shock of the old intimate reality, did it occur to her that it was, after all, for Julia Nethersole, a rather singular outpouring. The more she thought of it the more startling it seemed—Julia's flinging off of the reticence that had wrapped her round. Freda was specially appalled by the audacity with which Julia had dragged Wilton Caldecott's history into the light of day. Her own mind had always approached it shyly and tenderly, with a sort of feeling that, after all, perhaps she would rather not know. ”

“ With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there like an incarnate Ennui, the terrible genius of the house.
The Colonel, though losing rapidly, was in high good humor. He displayed a chivalrous forbearance with the weakness of Mrs. Fazakerly, who committed every folly and indiscretion possible to a partner. He bowed when he dealt to her; he bowed when she dealt to him; he bowed when she revoked.
"'To err is human,'" said the Colonel.
"'To forgive, divine,'" said Mrs. Fazakerly, smiling at Durant, as much as to say, "You observe his appropriation of the supreme rôle?" ”

“ It was because they both felt that Antigone ought not to be, as she put it, "overshadowed" by him; he wished that she should be associated, intimately associated, with his work; that the child should have her little part in his glory. It was not only her share of life which he took and so to speak put in the bank for her, but an investment for Antigone in the big business of his immortality. There she was, there she always would be, associated with Charles Wrackham and his work.
She sighed under the sunshade. "That child," she said, "can do more for him, Mr. Simpson, than I can." ”

“ London has that compelling style, that skill in character portrayal and in the construction of unusual plot which since he first began to write fiction have always marked him apart from the rank and file of novelists. No writer to-day is more praised than Mr. London for the color of his stories, for the fertility of his imagination, for the strength of his prose, for the way in which he makes his people live. His versatility, for he can turn out a bit of grim tragedy or a tale brimming with humor with equal facility, makes him everybody's author. ”