Various

“ In the first place, there is the prestige. You buy a racing stable, and your name is known not only to your equals—the other owners, the members of the jockey clubs—but to every office boy who “plays the ponies,” to every great lady who wants a competent guide to the paddock. Mr. Belmont may build subways and conduct gigantic banking operations, but it is as the man who named Belmont Park that he is known to a majority of his fellow countrymen. The racegoing community is an epitome of all society, from the “tout” and the beggar to the multi-millionaire. ”

“ Here the beach sloped suddenly. The cliffs came out in a convex sweep of several rods, with a sharp jut of rock thrust out from the midst of it, like a fish’s fin. Over it, up to the cliff face, the water fawned and leaped, and in its sucking recoil left bare for an instant a narrow neck of sand.
Blanche looked at the bulging bluff, the sharp rock. That made it bad. One could not make a straight dash—would have to make an angle—out and then back; and a moment’s hesitation at the turn—well, it wouldn’t do to meet the ebb there. Blanche knew the strength of the undertow. ”

“ The mere word “horse-racing” would have struck terror to the hearts of our grandmothers, and thus a sport perfectly harmless to most of us has acquired a most alluring flavor of naughtiness. It is this feeling, this common sense of emancipation, that holds together a race-going crowd with a general sense of gayety. For as a nation we are not conspicuous for gayety. If we do not take our amusements solemnly, like the English, we at least take them strenuously. In this respect, racing has changed a good deal in the last twenty years. ”

“ Wade the other faces were but a blur around Hastings; to Carrington nothing was clear but his son’s face, chilled blue-white, as the lad leaned in utter weariness against Trevanion.
Neither man saw Richards, nor heard his bluff “All safe!” But the waiting crowd, heedless of old animosities for the moment, took up the cheer. It served as chorus when John Carrington, catching Ned’s icy hands in his, said, hoarsely: “Thank God!”—when the lad, striving to smile his wonted brave smile, answered: “I do, dad;” when Trevanion, crying: “’E must keep movin’!” ”

“ Lillian had not, as she first threatened, ignored Blanche. She had invited her, if not to dine, at least to a beach tea, to a driving party; had talked with her at the country club; had kept her before Wallie, always at arm’s length, as if to give him ample opportunity for comparison.
Walter could find no flaw in his sister’s attitude of disinterested politeness, of pale cordiality toward Blanche Remi, but side lights on it now and then made him suspicious. He was bewildered—as bewildered as a man tangled in a veil. ”

“ He may become attentive to a smart girl not so accustomed to attention as to be overcritical, or if he is above this sort of thing, I know of nothing so hopeful as racing. Here is a sport in which he may become known without forming undesirable social ties, without proclaiming his acquaintance with undesirable people. There is a chance for him to meet men of the best position in an atmosphere congenial to friendship—a mutual interest in a great sport. At the same time there is no role in which a man may appear better than in that of a straightforward and generous sportsman. ”

“ How good, how awfully, abjectly good, she could be if she had him—the only man who had never made love to her! She remembered, with a stir of pure pleasure, how at first she had been piqued and puzzled that he did not. Afterward, how she had loved him for it! But since this woman, his sister, had come, Blanche did not know how it had been brought about, but she knew that she and Walter, who had been so close, so understanding, were apart and at odds. He had trusted her, and now he suspected her.
She saw Lillian Gueste’s hand in it. Blanche did not reason ”

“ The girl kicked off her tennis shoes and handed them to Walter, stripped off her ulster, and stood out in a scarlet bathing dress that, covering the knees, left bare legs, slim, brown and dimpled as a child’s. She lingered across the interval of dry sand, calling over her shoulder to Walter something that left him a-grin with amusement; then went joyously down the dip of the beach for the rush of the incoming breakers, and launched into it with the swash of a little, launching ship. The lawlessness of it was beyond any words Lillian knew. ”

“ There’s nothing quite as conventional as your properly-brought-up young person; and Cecilia was as perfectly turned out a specimen as a wise mother and a good school could accomplish. She was, in fact, the beau ideal of the young person for whom we keep our magazines spotlessly pure, and in whose behalf we cry aloud when a play is not better than it should be.
“She said afterward,” Drake told me, “that she felt as if she’d been reading one of those society papers that haven’t the best reputation in the world.” ”

“ I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number. ”

“ There was a crowd of miners now, watching for the cage to appear. The jargon of Finnish comment sounded to Mr. Wade like the buzzing of bees. Then the cage came in sight. Empty and dripping wet.
The next second everything was action, and Richards its mainspring. His orders pelted down like hailstones. Men, tools, paraphernalia, filled the cage. Other men went racing off on surface errands.
Mr. Wade, paralyzed by his complete ignorance of conditions or remedies, seemed crushed under the consciousness of casualty. Richards caught him by the arm and shook him into attention. ”

“ It was to have completed his education, which included, besides some Greek grammar, the use of a cue, a little Cavendish and the racing calendar. He was five-and-twenty, a gentleman; dressed well, looked well and lived well; on the whole, a nice fellow, deeply attached to his father and devotedly to himself.
The former was becoming an old man, having married late in life; was short, had a stoop, a halo of whitened hair, and a face that was a mask of merriment. His kindliness and humor were bywords, and his stories always made a widening silence in a room, to which fresh listeners drifted. ”

“ He saw her at the country club dances magnetize the men too bored to dance into an interested circle round her. Dismayed, he saw her first with one, then with another, driving, swimming, sitting on the beach under one parasol in the association so intimate, so informal, that, before Lillian came, he had usurped to the exclusion of the many. Finally, out of the crowd, as the one oftenest with her, he saw Blair Hemming, the man of loose lips and good-natured eyes, to whom Blanche had bowed that morning on the beach. ”

“ Where on earth was the cab? It was a comfort to vent irritability on something.
Then he roved over to the trunk he had packed with such forethought.
He laughed a little bitterly.
“Poor old Velantour! He will be disappointed, too,” he whispered. “But of the two old men who love me, one has to go to the wall. And it shan’t be dad.”
He tramped up and down restlessly until he heard the sound of wheels.
Then he called to Elenore.
“I am going now.”
“Not in this cab, you are not,” her voice answered him. “This is mine. Yours will be here in ten minutes, and you will have lots of time then.” ”

“ They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. ”

“ Cecilia had just caught sight of Almington as he knelt, holding the hand of Virtue, his lean legs bent like the blade of a knife. Almington generally cuts a fine figure, through a certain sense of the fitness of things. His air of secret melancholy wins half his battles for him, and he is one of those men who must at any cost hang on to the last shred of dignity, as they are nothing without it. ”

“ When the mind is sensible of inertia—the eyes catch sight of living forms, and the soul yearns toward something which it has not—it may be taken for granted that a life-breath has blown over the valley of dead bones.
In the case of Gertrude Warrener, it was indeed a tomb in which she awakened, and she did not know that she had been immured.
In her seventeenth year, George Warrener, just received into a subordinate position in a New York banking and broking firm, began to pay her his bashful attentions. ”

“ And, too, Richards had at last taken Mr. Wade’s measure—or thought he had.
“You have to sling softsoap to suit the pig-headed old sissy,” he phrased it.
And he assumed a bluff heartiness which actually became genuine at times, as he explained carefully and clearly the A B C’s of things.
For Richards loved the mine he had made, loved it after the fashion of his nature, with an intensity of possession.
Fought for it fairly when fairness served best, and trickily when trickiness seemed more profitable. Took a man’s genuine pride when he had forced it to obey him. ”

“ The tide was running in high and full. Where the first bold bluff jutted out, a distance of some six yards, the sliding foam already lapped the rock. Once around the turn of the bluff, the beach lay before her—a long white, empty sweep under black cliffs.
She rode at an easy canter, breathing in the stinging salt air, looking out upon the water, where the dark “seaward line” swung with the swell a mile out in “the channel.” She had lost the choking tears, the despair of her first rush down the Monticito road. She felt not happy, but wildly at liberty. ”

“ Men have been known more than once to follow a woman for the charm of the nape of her neck; that soft, pretty turn, the lovely part of the form where the head with more or less beauty—according to type—joins the shoulder and body.
Before Mrs. Warrener was within two blocks of her destination, she heard some one walking fast behind her, and not unnaturally turned to see who followed her with a step so decided in the lonely street.
It was Mr. McAllister. ”

“ The instant the orchestra begins this preliminary canter to the dance, every couple rises, and each girl expects her escort to leave her the moment she reaches her chaperon. For him to remain would be an exhibition of social awkwardness. A man can make as many engagements on one girl’s card as she will let him, but they must not follow each other.
Dozens of men have sighed for this rule at other balls, but so far the St. Cecilia is the only one that had the courage to start it and the conviction to retain it. ”

“ I won’t stand it,” he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”
“What did he say?”
“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”
“In what way?” The girl was breathless.
He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.
“Oh, Walter!” Her arms fell at her sides with a gesture of eloquent despair. ”

“ But to have your first hero of romance make himself ridiculous—that is the end of all things. Sorrow has then no dignity. A broken heart for a man like that is out of the question. Oh, it’s a bitter thing to think the drama of one’s life a tragedy and have it turn out a low comedy!
Cecilia saw her hero exactly as he was, at that moment, stripped of all adornment. ”

“ While English leading ladies must have fumed at Alexander’s neglect of “home talent,” Madame Le Bargy showed that it is quite possible not only to play with grace and facility in a foreign language, but actually to prove more intelligible than a good many London actresses who flatter themselves that they speak good English. Madame Le Bargy’s English was an absolute revelation. Naturally it had an accent—a delightful one—and Paris was stamped on everything she said, but compared with Mrs. Fiske in New York, or Miss Ashwell in London, Madame Le Bargy’s diction was wonderful. ”

“ And, alas! it takes more than honor, piety and pride together to make a man forget that. And a young man in especial. For we are very practical when young, and only fight the good fight for a substantial share in the plunder; we ask what a man will get in exchange for his soul.
Veynes fought it, there is that to his credit; and it is pleasant to remember that, of all his obligations, duty to his father died the hardest; sheer tenderness for the old man’s hopes often wringing from him a resolve to conquer passion and wed a pedigree. ”

“ Velantour, whose caustic criticisms usually confined themselves to technique, and took small account of souls!
Carrington tingled to his finger tips in the desire to be off. Life was good—was “bully,” as Carrington phrased it. And he whistled softly, rapturous as a thrush, as he crossed the studio to lift a corner of the rug which covered a trunk masquerading as a seat, a trunk locked and strapped; packed with an infinite forethought for any possible contingency that might arise during the trip; with enough paint tubes and brushes to set up a small dealer ”