“ What is more detestable than the triumph of mere brains? Your heroes, do they not tax, extort, pillage, slaughter, and burn for their own glory? Do they not ride over law, morality, and justice, your world's heroes? They are not my heroes. When men shrink at nothing to gain their success--what shall we say of them? But to hold law, morality, and justice inviolable; to conquer strength but only by weakness, to vanquish with pity, to crush with mercy--that alone is moving greatness."
"Where do you find it?" demanded Kimberly sharply. ”

“ Francis is to play Lazarus to my Dives. When I am in hell I am to have my cup of cold water from him. And remember, Francis, if you love me, the conditions. Don't forget the conditions; they are the essence of the contract. I am to have the water one drop at a time. Don't forget that; one drop at a time. Eternity is a long, long while."
Francis, ill at ease, took a pinch of snuff to compose himself.
"Your rôle doesn't seem altogether to your liking, Francis," suggested Imogene.
"His rôle! Why, it's paradise itself compared to mine," urged Kimberly. ”

“ Kimberly started from his apathy. "I?" He relapsed again into moodiness. "No." The thought moved him to a protest. "How can I reach a far-off thing like faith?" he demanded with angry energy---"a shadowy, impalpable, evasive, ghostly thing? How can I reach, how can I grasp, what I cannot see, what I cannot understand?"
"You can reach it and you can grasp it. Such questions spring from the anger of despair; despair has no part in faith. Faith is the death of despair. From faith springs hope. It is despair that pictures faith to you as a far-off thing." ”

“ If that is so, Alice was my baptism."
"Then your choice is already made, Robert."
"Why do you say that? When I choose I shall no longer be here. What I resent is being forced to choose. I hate to bow to law. My life has been one long contempt for it. I have set myself outside every law that ever interfered with my desires or ambitions. I have scorned law and ignored it--and I am punished. What can a man do against death?"
"Even so, there is nothing appalling in Christianity. Merely choose the form best adapted to your individual needs." ”

“ If you would only stop running yourself to death, Fritzie, and put on ten pounds, you would be absolute perfection."
"If I stopped running myself to death what would there be to live for?" demanded Fritzie, refastening the last pin in her Dresden girdle. "We all have to live for something."
Alice put her hand to her head. "I wonder what I have to live for?"
Fritzie turned sharply. "You? Why nothing but to spend your money and have a good time. Too bad about you, isn't it? You'll soon have a million a year for pin-money." ”

“ Meantime, you don't realize, Alice, quite, how young you are, do you? Nor how much in earnest I am. Let us turn to that for a while."
From a shrub at his side he plucked sprigs of rosemary and crushed them with the spray. "Even love never begins but once. So, for every hour that passes, a memory; for every hour that tarries, a happiness; for every hour that comes, a hope. Do you remember?"
"I read it on your sun-dial." ”

“ But even then the face is only the dial of the watch; it may be very fair. Sometime I see her mind--and everything is gone!"
"Would it be impertinent to ask who has put women up in this way to be inspected and criticised?" retorted Alice.
"Not in the least. I am speaking only in illustration and if you are annoyed with me I shall miss making my point. Do I give up merely because I have lost an illusion? Not at all. Another springs up at once, and I welcome it. Let us live in our illusions; every time we part with one and find none to take its place we are poorer, Mrs. MacBirney, believe me." ”

“ When the "out" score had been posted, De Castro suggested that the party go down to the tenth hole to follow the leaders in.
A sea-breeze tempered the sunshine and the long, low lines of the club-house were gayly decorated. Pavilions, spread here and there among the trees, gave the landscape a festival air.
On the course, the bright coloring of groups of men and women moving across the fields made a spectacle changing every moment in brilliancy.
Kimberly greeted Alice with a gracious expectancy. He was met with a lack of response nothing less than chilling. ”

“ While to me your beauty--do not shake your head despairingly--your beauty is the delicacy of girlhood, you yourself are a woman. You have known life, and sorrow. I cannot lead you as a fairy once led you from girlhood into womanhood--would that I could have done it! He should be a very tender guide who does that for a woman.
"But I can lead you, I think, Alice, to everything in this world that consoles a woman for what she gives to it. ”

“ Dolly waved her hand as if to dismiss controversy.
"Gold is so common," objected Lottie Nelson.
"Not more so than lapis," retorted Dolly.
"But isn't that the glory of gold," suggested Robert, "that it is common? It has the seal of approval of mankind; what higher sanction do you want? You are always safe in resting with that approval. I believe in common things--pearls for example and rubies. I am just common enough to like them."
Bell, passing behind his mistress, spoke in her ear. Alice's face lighted and she caught Kimberly's eye. "He is here," she nodded laughingly across the table. ”

“ About the tables pretty, overfed married women, of the plump, childless type, with little feet, fattening hands, and rounding shoulders, carried on a running chatter with men younger than their husbands.
A young girl, attended at her table by married men, was trying to tell a story, and to overcome unobserved, her physical repugnance to the whiskey she was drinking.
In the dining-room Lottie Nelson was the centre of a lively company, and her familiar pallor, which indulgence seemed to leave untouched, contrasted with the heightened color in Dora Morgan's face. ”

“ At the threshold of the dining-room, Kimberly paused. The table was dressed in yellow with the lowest tones in the fruits of the centrepiece. The pears were russet, the grapes purple, and pomegranates, apples, and golden plums supplied the tints of autumn. The handles of the old silver basket were tied with knots of broad, yellow ribbon. Alice, touching the covers here and there, passed behind the chairs.
"You get your effects very simply," observed Kimberly. "Only people with a sure touch can do that." ”

“ Married people, if we may judge from what they say, tend to reflect more concerning their mates.
Alice, it is certain, knew less of herself. Much of the confidence of five years earlier she had parted with, some of it cruelly. Yet coming at twenty-five into the Kimberly circle, and with the probability of remaining in it, of its being to her a new picture of life, Alice gradually renewed her youth. Some current flowing from this joy of living seemed to revive in her the illusions of girlhood. ”

“ Kimberly, while his wound was still bleeding, could talk to Hamilton more freely than to any one else.
The day after their return to The Towers the two men were riding together in the deep woods over toward the Sound when Kimberly spoke for the first time freely of Alice. "You know," he said to Hamilton, "something of the craving of a boy's imagination. When we are young we dream of angels--and we wake to clay. The imagination of childhood sets no bounds to its demands, and poor reality, forced to deliver, is left bankrupt. ”

“ Walking hurriedly to the mantel with another jar of roses, she found her fear extreme. Could it be possible Kimberly would dream of saying to her husband what he had said to her yesterday? She smothered at the thought, yet she knew his appalling candor and felt unpleasantly convinced that he was capable of repeating every word of it. The idea threw her into a panic. She resolved not to face him under such circumstances; she was in no position to do so. "Tell him," she said abruptly, "that as much as I should like to hear what he has to say, he will have to excuse me this morning." ”

“ It really is not necessary," pleaded Alice.
"Oh, it is," said Dolly decidedly, "I want you to understand. Suicide has been a spectre to the Kimberlys for ages. Two generations ago Schuyler Kimberly committed suicide at sixty-six--think of it! Oh! I could tell you stories. There has been no suicide in this generation. But the shadow," Dolly's tones were calm but inflected with a burden of what cannot be helped may as well be admitted, "seems only to have passed it to fall upon the next in poor Tennie. ”

“ But you have, along with your saints, some very foolish rules in your church, Francis. Take the case of Mrs. MacBirney. There is a woman who has done evil to no one and good to every one. She finds herself married to a man who thenceforth devotes himself to but one object in life--the piling up of money. She is forgotten and neglected. That is not the worst; he, with no religion of his own, makes it his business to harass and worry her in the practice of hers. He is filled with insane jealousies, and moved by equally insane hatreds of whatever she desires. ”

“ MacBirney echoed, incredulously. "Why, even Nelson, and he's supposed to think the world and all of him, calls him as cold as the grave when he wants anything."
Alice stuck to her verdict. "I can't help what Nelson says; and I don't pretend to know how Mr. Kimberly would act when he wants anything. A kind-hearted man is kind to those he likes, and a cold-blooded man is just the same to those he likes and those he doesn't like. There is always something that stands between a cold-blooded man and real consideration for those he likes--and that something is himself." ”

“ There is only one essential form of Christianity--you know what it is. I tell you I never will bow to a law that is not made for every man, rich or poor, cultured or crude, ignorant or learned. I never will take up the husks of a 'law adapted to individual needs.' That is merely making my own law over again, and I am leaving that. I am sick of exploiting myself. I despise a law that exploits the individual. I despise men in religious thought that exploit themselves and their own doctrines. ”

“ You are pretty clever, after all," declared MacBirney still laughing.
She threw herself back in her chair. "Oh, Walter, you don't understand at all! Nothing could be further from what I am thinking. I ought not to say he has been attentive enough to speak of. It is not that I dislike Mr. Kimberly. But he does somehow make me uncomfortable. Perhaps I don't understand their way here."
"Why, that is all there is to it, Alice. It's merely their way. Give it no thought. He is simply being agreeable. Don't imagine that every man that sends you flowers is interested in you. Is that all, Allie?" ”

“ She faltered an instant. "If it will only bring us happiness, Walter."
"Alice, I'm afraid I have been harsh, at times." Her memory swept over bitter months and wasted years, but her heart was touched. "It is all because I worry too much over business. There will be no more worries now--they are past and gone. And I want you to forget everything, Allie." He embraced her fervently. "I have had a good deal of anxiety first and last. It is over now. Great God! This is so easy here. Everything is so easy for these people."
The telephone bell tinkled. ”

“ With you I bury every earthly hope; for I take God to witness, in you I have had all my earthly joy!" He walked away and never saw her face again.
The unintelligible service in the church did not rouse him from his torpor and he was only after a long time aware of a strange presence on the altar. Just at the last he looked up into the sanctuary. Little clouds of incense rising from a swinging thurible framed for an instant the face of a priest and Kimberly saw it was the archbishop.
The prelate stood before the tabernacle facing the little church filled with people. ”

“ A woman's life is nothing but sacrifice. The trouble is that women bear their burdens uncomplainingly. That is where all women make a mistake. My life has been a whole series of sacrifices, and I propose people shall know it."
"No matter, Dolly," suggested Imogene, "your wrongs shall be righted in the next world."
"I should just like the chance to tell my story up there," continued Dolly, fervently.
Kimberly turned to Alice: "All that Dolly fears," said he, in an aside, "is that heaven will prove a disappointment. ”

“ At high mass, an hour later, villagers saw a fine lady--a Second Lake lady, they shrewdly fancied from the carriage that brought her--kneeling among them in a pew close to the altar, and quite oblivious of those about her, kneeling, too, at times when they stood or sat; kneeling often with her face--which they thought pretty--hidden in her hands as if it somehow had offended; kneeling from the credo until the stragglers in the vestibule and about the church door began to slip away from the last gospel. ”

“ Alice realized it was not right to live in a home in this way, but MacBirney himself had taught her so many ways of wrong living that compunction had grown dull. His pupil, long unwilling to accept his debasing standards of married life, long suffering the cruelty of finding them enforced upon her, had at last become all that he had made her and something unpleasantly more--she made herself now complete mistress of her own affairs. ”