Philip Curtiss

“ No matter how life might shape itself on the morrow, to-night he might as well take it as it offered.
He dared not linger too long in those empty rooms on the second floor, but even in the few minutes before he came down Annie had worked facile magic. In the dining-room his old glass candlesticks had replaced the silver ones which Leila had brought as a part of her wedding outfit. Just what else Annie had done to the room he could not distinguish, but the whole scene of the waiting table, with its place for one, was a startling resurrection, Annie, in fact, had done her work almost too well. ”

“ It was only occasional startling little physical facts about her that ever surprised him after all these years, as one is startled at moments by unexpectedly mature acts or gestures in a child—uncanny hints of a purely biological evolution in which Nature alone plays any part. ”

“ Calvin Moore, for his part, could hardly say that he had been disillusioned by his married life, because in strict terms he had never been illusioned. It was inconceivable that a man of his quick perceptions could ever have supposed that Leila would be an intellectual companion. ”

“ It was too much like playing a quick march after the funeral. Leila had always refused pointblank to serve them. "Steak and French frieds," she had always insisted, were "so restauranty." She herself liked things with cream sauces.
But Annie still hesitated in the doorway. "Mr. Moore," she suggested cautiously, "there is still one bottle of old Bass ale in the cellar——"
Annie, too, as her master knew, was haunted by that same faint dread of unseemliness. In her good heart she was merely the atavistic old Irishwoman, pandering to the whims of her men-folks, even when those whims were vices ”

“ Because years of married life had made her familiar with all of her husband's grotesque incongruities—the awkward way in which he tied his cravats and the stitched initials on his underwear—she came to believe that she had at least punctured the myth of his tremendous intellect. ”

“ Fundamentally he had married her for the reason that most men marry—because the momentary desire to marry and the financial ability to do so had, for the first time in his life, come at the same moment. ”