“ Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.
"Forgive me, O my kitchen gods, forgive my injurious hands and heart; but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and I, we bar the gates of heaven from him." ”

“ The veil, I say, is a symbol of their shuddering cohesion which death would normally destroy. But the will of this woman, as it triumphed over life, she has made to triumph over death: if Emily removes the veil she becomes, with her lack of training, her useless equipment, a helpless beggar; if she does not remove it, if she never sees her mother's face, she will be tormented by memory, bound forever, as she was in life, to a blank and inscrutable shawl. Is it forgiveness—or justice, mercy or revenge?"
Fawcett broke off as a swirl of guests flooded the coolness of the porch. ”

“ Listen." He holds up his hand, and out of the simmering dusk rises the groan of iron and steam and toil. "It is marching music like the bands of armies," says Regan. "D' you understand? You must; you can feel it! Such armies I command and will bring you up in the way of commanding if you but keep the bargain you made."
"Is it walk off the duty, you mean?" asks Tim astonished.
"But listen again, as man to man," says Regan, patient and crafty and desperate. "I have no way into Barlow, bold as I have been in building to its very walls. A few crooks who run the town keep me out. ”

“ The stovepipe in the kitchen fell down, there followed the sound as of some scaly creature dragging its body across the linoleum. Then there came a fall of plaster, and the kitchen stove itself appeared stealthily through the bedroom wall.
"My conscience!" said Elmer Higgins at the height of his mystification.
But we anticipate. It will be well at this point to look in on the affairs of Hat Tyler for a moment. When it became apparent that the Minnie Williams would not leave the ways until softer weather had loosened up the launching grease the crowd drifted away from her. ”

“ Only a short time afterward Tim raises the car fare to ten cents, recking little of the lime burners' wrath and the high glances of Katy O'Hare at the hard little face and hunched ragged body as he drives on, clenching the reins in his fists. Divil a bit does he seek their goodwill or anybody's, knowing that there is profit to be made only from the fear that people have of him as they have of Regan. ”

“ Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her resistance. She knew.
"Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does not wish the importunings of a small wife. Worship thou alone the great God, and the shadow of that worship will fall on my heart."
"Nay, I cannot worship alone. My worship is not acceptable in the sight of the foreign God. My ways are not his ways."
Foh-Kyung's face was unlined and calm, yet Dong-Yung felt the hidden agony of his soul, flung back from its quest upon gods of plaster and paint. ”

“ And he is always on time in every weather, so that presently the lime burners relent and joke him, and Katy in pity for the outcast would pat his cheek friendlily—but never an encouragement do they receive from Tim standing at his brake and speaking sternly to Charley, meager and windbitten but unconquerable by humor or kindness as he has been by threat and danger.
All day a bright rage chars the bony breast; at evening it smolders as if having no more fuel in the wasted body. Yet Tim sits cross-legged with old sacks folded round him, staring unwaveringly into the loneliness. ”

“ She crept back through the house, and looked at Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.
In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor. ”

“ In the crook of his left elbow he carried roses. Their fragrance permeated the café and, for once, the odor of stale tobacco was not dominant.
"You are unhappy," he repeated mildly as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to say.
"I am," I answered frankly. "The world is a stupid place to live in."
"You must not say that," he reproached quietly. "It is we who are stupid. The world is beautiful. Won't you accept a rose?" Like a prince in a fairy story he bowed grandly and offered me an American Beauty still moist with the mock dews of the florist. ”

“ It is I, who never had a chance to be a person, who gave him the fire in his head. If I would have had a chance to go to school and learn the language, what couldn't I have been? It is I and my mother and my mother's mother and my father and father's father who had such a black life in Poland; it is our choked thoughts and feelings that are flaming up in my children and making them great in America. And yet they shame themselves from me!"
For a moment Mr. and Mrs. Pelz were hypnotized by the sweep of her words. Then Hanneh Breineh sank into a chair in utter exhaustion. ”

“ With a smolder in his eyes and drumbeat in his bony little breast Tim sits on his pallet below a lantern hung to a beam, listening whilst the old building rolls and pitches to the passing trains and loose shingles hoot in the blast above. And 't is worthy of note that spiders swing down from cobwebbed rafters to glare at him with interest as a comrade weaving a web of his own; and the mice do not come out at present, but scurry all to set their nests in order and be ready for the part they are to play in the history of Tim the messenger. 'T is little we know. ”

“ But the time is at hand when she must appeal to him or never at all in this world, so the saints inspire her to speak a message to the man of power and she smiles with shy pride of their confidence in her.
"Faith, I will talk to him as a boy again," she plans; "'Danny,' I will say, 'when the lanterns of the yard do beckon to your ambition is there not one light above and beyond, brighter than all the others, which beckons the spirit?' Then he will be guided by it," reasons old Molly with her solemn gaze fixed on the future of Dan. ”

“ The lonely idleness of Riverside Drive stunned all her senses and arrested all her thoughts. It gave her that choked sense of being cut off from air, from life, from everything warm and human. The cold indifference, the each-for-himself look in the eyes of the people about her were like stinging slaps in the face. Even the children had nothing real or human [Pg 343] in them. They were starched and stiff miniatures of their elders.
But the most unendurable part of the stifling life on Riverside Drive was being forced to eat in the public dining-room. ”

“ They are young and they are together. Poor children!" said Dame Melicent. "Youth cries to youth for the toys of youth, and saying, 'Lo! I cry with the voice of a great god!'"
"Still," said Madame Adelaide, "Puysange is a good fief."
But Florian heeded neither of them as he stood there by the sunlit stream, in which no drop of water retained its place for a moment, and which yet did not alter in appearance at all. ”

“ Florian drank first. Then Tiburce took his turn, looking at Florian as Tiburce drank slowly. As he drank, Tiburce d'Arnaye was changed even more, and the shape of him altered, and the shape of him trickled as though Tiburce were builded of sliding fine white sand. So Tiburce d'Arnaye returned to his own place. The appearances that had sat to his left and to his right were no longer there to trouble Florian with memories. And Florian saw that the mists of Walburga's eve had departed, and that the sun was rising, and that the graveyard was all overgrown with nettles and tall grass. ”

“ For these were Myry's coronation robes; it was about this adorning that old Mrs. Bray had continuously cautioned Nell. Nell, in that smug, proprietary manner of hers, had turned back a blanket—enough to show the tiny yoke which he had dangled, and the neck which it encircled, and the red and wrinkly head on top of that—-
Like a well-conned article of catechism, words came to Marvin—words he could never have got from his pa.
"Oh, Myry—I love you! How beautiful you are!"
A strange cosmetic glowed on Myra's white cheek. Happiness is the surest beautifier. He might never say it again. ”

“ From behind the stove peeped the frightened face of one of the fire-tenders. The whole room was turned to stone, motionless, expectant, awaiting the releasing moment of arousement—all, that is, but the creeping sunshine, sliding nearer and nearer the crossed feet of the kitchen gods; and the hissing steam fire, warming, coddling the hearts of the gods. Sun at their feet, fire at their hearts, food before them, and mortals turned to stone!
Foh-Kyung laughed softly, standing there, eye-level with the kitchen gods. He stretched out his two hands, and caught a god in each. ”

“ Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.
"Their God loves all the world. Their God is different, little Flower, from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses. He loves even little girl babies that mothers would throw away. Truly his heart is still more loving than the heart of a mother."
"And yet I am fearful—" Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and crimson tapers stood ready before them. "Our gods I have touched and handled."
"Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left." ”

“ Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.
"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."
"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha himself. ”

“ Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to walk—to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places—to find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his hurdling, but he relished the exercise.
He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. ”

“ How, since all else moves so swiftly, can a just God afford any longer to be patient? Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few cycles of months. No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing, those full-bodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping blood. ”

“ They went out again into the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway, back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.
"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweler's and buy thee new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou forgotten to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good Buddhists rejoice?" ”

“ He laughed a long time—it was as if he didn't want to be left without the sound of his laughing.
"There's nothing so silly as to laugh when there's nothing to laugh at," his wife said finally.
"Oh, I don't know about that," said Joe Doane.
"And while it's very nice to make the children presents, in our circumstances it would be better to give them useful presents."
"But what's so useful as mourning?" demanded Doane. "Think of all Myrtie has got to mourn about. Poor, poor Myrtie—she's got a father!" ”