Theodore Winthrop

“ You excite my curiosity in degree, though not in kind, quite as much as Densdeth does. And now that you and he are brought together, I hope these two mysterious personages will explain each other by some flash of hostile electricity. I wait for light from the meeting of the thunder-clouds.”
“It must be very late,” said Dreeme in a weary tone. “What a dismal part of the city! This squalor sickens me. These rows of grog-shops infect me with utter hopelessness. Sin — sin everywhere, and the sorrow that never can be divorced from sin! How can we escape? How can we save others? ”

“ Byng, as I have before told you, that you do not thoroughly share my sympathy for poverty and suffering and crime.”
“Perhaps not fully. My heart is not so tender as yours. I cannot seem to make other people’s distress my personal business, as you do. I endure the misfortunes of strangers with reasonable philosophy. Suffering, like pain, I suppose is to be borne heroically, until it passes off. Every man has his hard times.”
“You are not cruel,” said Dreeme, “but you talk cruelly on a subject you hardly understand. ”

“ Night! when the sun, the eye of God, leaves men to their own devices; when the moon is so faint, and the stars so far away in the infinite, that their inspection and record are forgotten; when Light, the lawgiver and orderer of human life, withdraws, and mankind are free to break or obey the commands daylight has taught them. ”

“ He lighted his cigar. Again by the glow I observed the same relentless, triumphant look.
Densdeth turned down the Avenue. I rejoined Dreeme. He took my arm again and clung to it almost weakly.
“What is the matter, Dreeme?” I asked, my tenderness for him all awake.
No answer, but a nervous pressure on my arm.
“You are tired. Shall we turn back?”
“Not the way that man has gone,” said he.
“Why not? What do you fear?”
“I heard him name himself Densdeth. I saw his face — that cruel face of his. Mr. Byng, — my dear friend, Robert Byng, — that man is evil to the core. ”

“ Fasting people cannot take violent exercise. One can dance on full, but not on meagre diet, on turkey, not on fish. But in default of balls, Mrs. Bilkes, still a leader of fashion, had her Lent evenings. They were The Thing, so Everybody agreed, and this evening was one of them. I had deserted for my walk with Dreeme.
Mrs. Bilkes’s house was just far enough above Quatorze Street, on the Avenue, to be in the van of the upward march of fashion. Files of carriages announced that all the world was with her that evening. ”

“ You will soften to others, and most to those who suffer for no fault of theirs, — the wronged, driven to despair by wrong-doing in those they love, — the erring, visited with what we name ruin, for some miserable mistake of inexperience. ”

“ All the poetry in my nature being latent, I need precisely you to bring it to the surface. The feminine element is largely developed in you, as a poetic artist. It precisely supplies the want which a sisterless and motherless man, like myself, has always felt. ”

“ We form a capital exclusive pair, close as any of the historic ones, — Orestes and Pylades, for example, — to close my long discourse classically.”
“Do not compare us to those ill-omened two. Orestes was ordained to slay his parent for her sin,” my friend rejoined, in an uneasy tone. ”