Various

“ I longed to shout, but before we could say anything further, Monty Saunders and a girl danced past us.
“So you brought it off?” said Lydia, looking after the receding pair.
“How did you know?” Felicia demanded.
“He told her,” explained little Cecilia Bennett, “when Lydia asked him how you could stand him around so much, he told her you were helping him out with Mildred—telling him what to do and keeping his courage up. He told me, too,” pursued Cecilia, with the importance one naturally feels when one is in the thick of the battle of life. ”

“ The sun came out and streamed through the high window upon the dress in their hands. It was like a drink of wine to look at it.
“There’s no denying it’s a handsome thing,” Jane said. “It does seem a pity to have the edges ravel. We might finish it, anyway, and sew it up in a bag with camphor.”
Through the gray languor that overlay Mrs. Colquhoun’s consciousness, glints of crimson began to find their way. Now the spot of color was disappearing under Mary Ann’s white apron; now it was in Jane’s stained hands; now it was passing from Jane to Selina. ”

“ How much crime and disaster and disease and ruin have come into the lives of American youth through women, and yet who doubts that women are the blessing of the whole national life? To say that certain evils come from a certain source suggests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source before studying whether greater evils might not result from its destruction, and without asking whether the evils might not be reduced, and the good from the same source remain untouched and untampered with. ”

“ A woman like Ireena may hold the tribal-family together; revive courage in dire surroundings; decide momentous debates as to reindeer-speculation; practise medicine and surgery; withstand the redoubtable devils of blizzard and thaw; serve the bad Siadey in his bloody sanctuary; and even dare the unmentionable good god’s isolating stretches of white cold, to serve an inquisitive painter from the South.
It was Ireena and Danillo who took Borissoff to the last pagan shrines of Europe, never visited before by a European. ”

“ Who desires that America, the idol of those who seek freedom from the tyranny of the Old World, shall trample on the right of personal liberty? And yet those hundreds of singing-societies which have joined in this outburst of moral indignation have forgotten that every law is a limitation of personal liberty. The demand of the nation must limit the demands of the individual, even if it is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who is directly hurt. ”

“ And there before your eyes the unbelievable has happened, Felicia is in tears, and it is your fault.
You are like a landsman who has pulled an innocent-looking plug out of the bottom of a boat and sees it fill and founder before his eyes; you feel like a man who lights a match and lo! his house is in flames; with such horror and bewilderment does the sight of a weeping Felicia fill you. Guilt and bewilderment struggle with one another, as her mouth quivers pitifully and her eyes fill with slow tears. ”

“ The Bowery is a mile of American life in which the nations of the earth meet for excitement and change. There is a business aspect of it which is permanent, but the many-colored throng surging up and down its side-walks all day and all night is ephemeral. It is the place for the homeless, for the out of kilter, for the rudderless wrecks who drift. ”

“ And now the last day, or rather the last night, had come, for the next morning Theodore Carden was to leave Birmingham, he hoped for ever, for New Zealand.
The few people he had been compelled to see had been strangely kind; quiet and gentle, as folk, no doubt, feel bound to be when in the presence of one condemned. As for Major Lane, he was stretching—no one knew it better than Carden himself—a great point in allowing the young man to leave England before the Garvice trial. ”

“ At this moment Jane and Selina came into the room to see what the sounds of merriment meant. They looked at patient and nurse with disapproving gloom. Jane settled herself at once to her knitting; Selina, who never worked in the afternoon when she was wearing her widow’s collar and cuffs, sat regarding her mother with an expression of grieved wonder. Mrs. Colquhoun was uncomfortably conscious of being judged by something in her own child of other heritage than hers—one of the strangest sensations a parent can have. ”

“ With grave, peculiar tenderness, Celia, before leaving, took up the baby and searched his little face, looked deep into his eyes, which told her of his mysterious little soul no more than before. She knew it was like trying to force open a shut flower. “Whatever happens now, dear,” she said to him, though without audible words, “we two go together. All that happens to you, happens to me. If you are in the future to be bad or afflicted, I am to be unhappy. ”

“ All of Borissoff’s paintings were done in the ice zone beyond the 70th parallel of north latitude, in the district between Archangel and the Yalmal Peninsula. He never tires of telling of the peculiar color-tones of this region, and the curious psychological effects of its distance, silence, and isolation. Living amid its singular light phenomena, where the spring-time snow turns pink against blue icebergs, and the boggy midsummer tundra swims in a sea of orange-red against a sky of aquamarine, even the Samoyed becomes a color worshiper. ”

“ You walk across the room, helplessly, hopelessly. You murmur forth apologies, though 478 you don’t know for what you are apologizing, and words of endearment and of sympathy, though you can’t tell what it is you are sympathetic about. You would do anything, abase yourself to any degree, to stop the noise of sobbing which is slowly sapping your manhood.
You stand looking down on poor Felicia—what is the matter with her? What has happened?
“I don’t believe you can be well, my darling,” you are fool enough to say. Inside you your other self is grumbling:
“Well, I’m hanged if I understand women!” ”

“ But when a Chicago minister hangs the American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large patch of black color on it, declares that the patch stands for the liquor evil which smirches the country, denounces wildly the men who spend for whiskey the money which ought to buy medicine for sick children, and then madly tears the black cloth from the stars and stripes and grinds it under his heel—then thousands rush out as excited as if they had heard a convincing argument. ”

“ I used to say to myself that if ever I could get what clothes I liked, I’d have a dress as near like that as I could find. Well, there I was to-day looking at the very thing, the same color, the same downy look, and all, and money enough in my purse to buy it. Of course I know it would be silly. But don’t it seem a pity that the things we dream of having some day—when the day comes, we don’t want ’em? I feel somehow as if I’m cheating that little girl that wished for the dress like a rose-in-campin’. ”

“ Felicia raises her head.
“You’re not!” says she spitefully. They’re the first words she has spoken since she pleaded with you in agonized tones to “let her be.”
Then, as you sit down to the mockery of oysters and soup, anger rises in you. What creatures women are! Hasn’t a man a right to ask why dinner isn’t ready in his own house without the sky falling? You look at your watch; more than half an hour late. Well, why wasn’t it ready? Why? When a man comes home tired from the office, he has a right to expect his dinner to be ready. ”

“ If Felicia couldn’t feel that I didn’t like what she did, I couldn’t, for the life of me, or even the life of Felicia, open my mouth. And I believe there are a great many men like me in the world, and more women, too. A certain kind of pain makes us dumb. A certain pride freezes back the words that would come. The men of us have perhaps seen our Felicias cry. ”

“ And can there be any doubt that disregard of law is the most dangerous psychological factor in our present-day American civilization? It is not lynch law which is the worst; the crimes against life are twenty times more frequent than in Europe, and as for the evils of commercial life which have raised the wrath of the whole well-meaning nation in late years, has not disregard of law been their real source? ”

“ The restaurant alone, with the hotel and the club, is the fit public place where guests sitting at tables may have beer and wine with their meals or after meals,—and all controlled by laws which absolutely forbid the sale of intoxicants to certain groups of persons, to children, to inebriates, and so on. As long as drinking means to the imagination of a considerable well-meaning minority of the nation the present-day repulsive life of saloons and bars, the minority will find it easy to terrorize and to whip into line the whole country. ”

“ If she had cared for the man,—the most brilliant man before, and now the most unhappy,—she pictured him handsome as a hero of Byron’s,—she would have had to cling to him and go down into the depths together. But spinsterhood had acquired an effect of fineness for her from the study of Celia, with the destruction of her happiness so perfectly concealed that one could detect it by no sign, unless that air of detachment, sometimes, and distance and fatigue, were an expression of it. In her latter mood Judith chose savagely to despise Celia for her defection from her lover ”

“ God Indra was in the wine for the Hindus and Dionysius for the Greeks. It is the optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional inspiration, which alcohol brought into the dulness of human days, and the history of culture shows it on every page. ”

“ A national life without the artificial inhibitions of the restraining centers becomes for the large masses a matter of mere practical calculation and righteous dulness. Truly the German, the Frenchman, the Italian who enjoys his glass of light wine and then wanders joyful and elated to the masterpieces of the opera, serves humanity better than the New Englander who drinks his ice-water and sits satisfied at the vaudeville show, world-far from real art. Better America inspired than America sober. ”

“ Sometimes the flushed face with its assumed haughtiness, “cutting her dead,” (Celia, with some idea, perhaps, of doing for her part a Christian’s duty, continued to bow as if unaware of the insult intended her) smote her with a sense of pity at the evil passions hardening that really beautiful face. The Comptons’ idea that they might have to give up the village as a summering place was forgotten. When a little chafed by some noisy exhibition of the Brays’ vulgarity, Celia used to say to herself hopefully that no doubt Judith would in time marry and go to live elsewhere. ”

“ Great, bull-headed dog-baboons, with naked fangs and clutching hands alert for murder; bounding mothers of squealing litters that led their young in a dash to the fight; terrible, lean old bitches that made for the men when others went for the corn,—they swooped like a flood of horror on the aghast Kafirs, biting, tearing, bounding through the air like uncouth birds; and in one second the throng of the Kafirs melted before them, and they were amid the corn. ”