“ All next day Suvaroff was in a fever; not a physical fever, but a mental fever that burned with devastating insistence. He could not lie still upon his bed, so he rose and stumbled about the city's streets. But nothing diverted him. Before his eyes a sheet of fire burned, and a blinding light seemed to shut out everything else from his vision. Even his thoughts crackled like dry faggots in a flame.
"When evening comes," he said, "a breeze will spring up and I shall have some relief." But almost at once he thought: "A breeze will do no good. It will only make matters worse! ”

“ These the Hayneses! These people, with hope and self-esteem once more in their hearts! These people, with a new, a unique place in the community's respect! It was all like a beautiful miracle; and, thinking of its maker, Luke choked suddenly and gulped.
There was a moist spot on the old Mexican hairless right under his eyes; but it had been made by tears of pride, not sorrow. Maw was right! A hero's folks hadn't ought to cry. And he wouldn't. Nat was better off than ever—safe and honored. ”

“ He had come to spend most of his holidays at Bewsher's great old house in Gloucestershire. That, too, was an illumination. It showed him what money was made for—the sunny quiet of the place, the wheels of a spacious living that ran so smoothly, the long gardens, the inevitableness of it all. Some day, he told himself, he would have just such a house. He has. It is his mistress. The world has not allowed him much of the poetry that, as you must already see, the man has in him; he takes it out on his place. ”

“ No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at present.
During the past year I have sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. As the most adequate means to this end, I have taken each short story by itself, and examined it impartially. ”

“ My darlings what died for it—my darlings—Aylorff—my husband!" There was a wail rose up off her words, like the smoke of incense curling, circling around her. "My darlings what died to make free!"
"Mamma—darling—mamma—Mr. Haas! Help! Mamma! My God!"
"Aylorff—my husband—I paid with my blood to make free—my blood—my son—my—own—" Immovable there, her arms flung up and tears so heavy that they rolled whole from her face down to the black grenadine, she was as sonorous as the tragic meter of an Alexandrian line; she was like Ruth, ancestress of heroes and progenitor of kings. ”

“ The hunchback waved him to silence. "Do whatever you wish, my friend, but remember, if you do tell me this thing, you and I will be forever bound by a tie that it will be impossible to break. With me it does not matter, but you are a young man, and all your life you will drag a secret about like a dead thing chained to your wrist. I am Flavio Minetti, and I kill every one who laughs at me! This Italian of whom you speak has laughed at me. I may wait a week—a month. It will be the same. No one has yet escaped me."
An exquisite fear began to move Suvaroff. ”

“ Turning off Kearny Street into Broadway, he had half a notion not to go home, but his dissatisfaction was so inclusive that home seemed, at once, quite as good and as hopeless a place to go as any other. So he pushed open the door of his lodging-house and stamped rather heavily up-stairs.
Although midnight, the first sound which greeted Suvaroff was the wheezing of the Italian's accordion.
"Now," muttered Suvaroff, "I shall suffer in silence no longer. Nobody in this city, much less in these wretched lodgings, has an ear for anything but the clink of money and the shrill laughter of women. ”

“ As the fagged stokers bent before the boilers, the hot water, dripping from the breeching, washed scalding channels through the coal-dust down their bare backs. They hailed this new torment with louder curses, but continued to endure it for hours, while outside the hurricane raged, no end, no limit, to its power.
Since the beginning of the watch the bilge-pumps had had all they could do to handle the leakage coming from the seams of the strained hull. Twice Neville had taken the throttle and sent his oiler to clear the suctions. ”

“ Gaston did not. What he found strong was the originality of his passenger—and the way that cognac failed, in spite of its friendly warmth, to cheer him. For he kept thinking of that absurd Bakhtiari, and of the telegraph operator, and of M'sieu Guy, and the others, as he sped northward on the silent moonlit river.
"This is very well, eh, Gaston?" uttered the Brazilian at last. "We march better without our objects of virtue." Gaston felt that he smiled as he lay smoking on his rug in the bottom of the boat. ”

“ Magin shrugged his shoulders.
"Extraordinary people! Do you really think the rest of the world so stupid? Or it is that the fog of your island has got into your brains? You always talk about truth as if it were a patented British invention, yet no one is less willing to call a spade a spade. Look at Cairo, where you pretend to keep nothing but a consul-general, but where the ruler of the country can't turn over in bed without his permission. A consul-general! Look at your novels! Look at what you yourself are saying to me!"
Matthews lighted a pipe over it. ”

“ And the rapids of Kaleh Bunder, where a rocky island flanked by two reefs threatened to bar any further progress, afforded the liveliest moments of their day.
The end of that day, nevertheless, found our sight-seer smoking cigarettes in Shir Ali Khan's garden at Dizful and listening to the camel bells that jingled from the direction of certain tall black pointed arches straddling the dark river. When Matthews looked at those arches by sunlight, and at the queer old flat-topped yellow town visible through them, he regretted that he had made up his mind to continue his journey so soon. ”

“ Magin," replied the Swiss. "Do you need one? But you haven't explained to me yet why you give me the pain of saying good-bye to you a second time."
"Partly, Mr. Ganz, because I am tired of sleeping in an oven, and partly because I—the Father of Swords has asked me to run up to Bala Bala before I leave. But principally because I need a case or two more of your excellent vin de champagne—manufactured out of Persian petroleum, the water of the Karun, the nameless abominations of Shuster, and the ever effervescing impudence of the Swiss Republic!" ”

“ Most men of Jo's age were standing before their mirror of a Saturday night, whistling blithely and abstractedly while they discarded a blue polka-dot for a maroon tie, whipped off the maroon for a shot-silk, and at the last moment decided against the shot-silk in favor of a plain black-and-white, because she had once said she preferred quiet ties. Jo, when he should have been preening his feathers for conquest, was saying:
"Well, my God, I am hurrying! Give a man time, can't you? I just got home. You girls have been laying around the house all day. ”

“ This was a mystery of a man to that dark woman from Regina.
Now in these days before blasting began, they were fond of talking marriage on Mushrat, thinking of this woman from Regina, who was at the disposal of no man there. They were full of doubts and wonderments, when they would be idling together in Scarecrow Charlie's. But now one morning when they were idling there, Shoepack Sam must be yawning and saying to them,
"Oh, my, this is the time now, before the sun is up, I'm glad I am not married. It's a pleasure to be a single man at this hour." ”

“ The terrace hung over a green chasm where the two converging gorges met at the foot of the crag of Bala Bala. Matthews looked down as from the prow of a ship into the tumbled country below him, through which a river flashed sinuously toward the faraway haze of the plains. The sound of water filling the still clear air, the brilliance of the morning light, the wildness and remoteness of that mountain eyrie, so different from anything he had yet seen, added a last strangeness to the impressions of which the young man had been having so many. ”

“ The thing took some manoeuvering; but the Lurs, with the help of much fluent profanity from the master, finally accomplished it without sinking the motor-boat. Gaston, sitting at the wheel to guard his precious engine against some clumsiness of the black-hatted mountaineers, looked on with humorous astonishment at this turn of affairs. He was destined, it appeared, to be disappointed in his hope of cheer. That cognac was really very good—if only one had had more of it. Still, one at least had company now; and he was not the man to be insensible to the fine champagne of the unexpected. ”

“ Bruce—I forgot all about Bruce. Oh, I was happy!... But that was because I knew nothing....
"Yes, I pleased George. But by-and-by he changed too. Then I couldn't say anything that he liked. 'Stupid child!' he called me. I tried, ever so hard, to please him. But it was like walking against a wind, that you can't push aside. You women, you just guess how I felt then! You just guess! You want your husband. It was the same with me. I want George. But he wouldn't listen to me no more."
The woman seemed to sink, to shrivel, under the weight of her recollection. ”

“ He was standing in the shadow, looking neither at Leila nor at me, but at Standish Burton. Burton turned to him.
"Yes," he muttered thickly, "they told me to tell you. They knew you'd be here."
"I see," said Leila. She looked at Standish and then at Dick Allport, and there came into her eyes a queer, glazed stare that filmed their brightness. "I am sorry that I asked questions, Mr. Allport, about something that was nothing to me. Will you forgive me?"
"There is nothing to be forgiven," he said. He turned to her and smiled a little. ”

“ In her dark-blue dress with the row of silver buttons down what was hip before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a mere stroke of hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine. Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up halfway to her throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweetmeat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath. ”

“ He put on his hat and stumbled down-stairs, out into the night. Crossing the street, he went at once to Bollo's Wine Shop. The hunchback was sitting on a garbage-can, almost at the entrance. At the sight of this misshapen figure, the irritating memory of the Italian and his impossible music recurred to Suvaroff. A sudden sinister cruelty came over him; he felt a wanton ruthlessness that the sight of ugliness sometimes engenders in natures sensitive to beauty. He went up to the hunchback and looked searchingly into the man's face. ”

“ The groaning of every rib and plate in the hull, the crash of seas against the sides, the thunder of waves breaking on deck, drowned the usual noises below.
The color of the men's courage began to show. Some kept grimly at their work, dumb from fear. Others covered fright with profanity, cursing the storm, the ship, their mates, cursing themselves. Larry, as he threw coal steadily through his fire-doors, hummed a broken tune. He gave no heed to Dan, who grew more savage as the slow hours of overtoil dragged by.
About four in the morning Neville called Larry to the engine-room. ”

“ Don't you ever catch, perhaps, some echo of the trickle?"
"That's not my idea of a lark," laughed Matthews.
Magin regarded him a moment.
"Well," he conceded, "Europe does take on a new perspective from the point of view of Susa. I see you are a philosopher, sitting amidst the ruins of empires and wisely preferring the trickle of your fountain to the trickle of the telegraph. If Austria falls to pieces, if Serbia reaches the Adriatic, what is that to us? Nothing but a story that in Elam has been told too often to have any novelty! Eh?" ”