Various

“ Lady Mallowe knew her way thoroughly.
“Who remembers the denials? What the world remembers is that Jem Temple Barholm was stamped as a cheat and a trickster. No one has time to remember the other thing. He is dead—dead! When a man’s dead it’s too late.”
She was desperate enough to drive her javelin home deeper than she had ever chanced to drive it before. The truth—the awful truth she uttered shook Joan from head to foot. She sprang up and stood before her in heart-wrung fury.
“Oh! You are a hideously cruel woman!” she cried. “They say even tigers care for their young! ”

“ But while a rush into prejudice or a hasty overriding of law may draw attention to some exceptional verdicts, in the overwhelming mass of jury decisions nothing is aimed at but a real clearing up of the facts. The evidence is submitted, and while the lawyers may have wrangled as to what is evidence and what is not, and while they may have tried by their presentation of the witnesses on their own side and by their cross-examinations to throw light on some parts of the evidence and shadows on some others, the jurymen are simply to seek the truth when all the evidence has been submitted. ”

“ Again the great Whistler opened the door, but now dressed in a suit of black, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. His welcome was graceful and cordial. With easy confidence we walked into the studio. A bright fire glowed at one end, in front of which was a round table covered with green rep, on which were tea-things, and dishes filled with dainty French cakes. A little maid, in neat cap and apron, was hovering about. All about us, turned to the wall and unframed, were seemingly hundreds of canvases. What has become of all those treasures since Whistler’s death? ”

“ American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface.
It cannot have escaped any reader of THE CENTURY that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. ”

“ Gilder’s time is showing now in new and surprising growth, and our problem to-day is not so much to enjoy the flowering literature which he promised as to study and to measure and to comprehend as nearly as possible the wealth of scientific and social and political and industrial achievement which has amazingly developed.
There is no escaping the fact that civilization, like the river tumbling and swirling between two lakes, is passing turbulently from the old convention of the last several generations to the unknown, almost unguessable convention of the not distant future. ”

“ I am not sure now that she was not merely being nice to me, and that, anyhow, she is not all wrong, and that the heartier point of view is the courage which can front life unashamed, which sees the divinity of fact and of beauty in the utmost seeming tragedy. Picasso’s grim presentation of decay and degradation is beginning to teach me something—the marvelous perfection of the spirit which is concerned with neither perfection, nor decay, but with life. ”

“ OF a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? ”

“ He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British journals then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. ”

“ No one guessed that the old peer sat and listened to stories of a red-headed, slim-bodied girl in a dingy New York boarding-house, that he liked them sufficiently to encourage their telling, that he had made a mental picture of a certain look in a pair of maternally yearning and fearfully convincing round young eyes, that he knew the burnished fullness and glow of the red hair until he could imagine the feeling of its texture and abundant warmth in the hand. ”

“ To every one who has been long familiar with Murray Bay its most delicate charm lies in the memories of the men whose dignity of character and fine friendliness of manner set a special seal upon the beautiful place. Among those who will not come again to brighten the summer days by their presence are Mr. Edward Blake and Mr. Justice Harlan. These men belong to the history of Canada and of the United States, but in matters that do not concern the muse of history they belong to Murray Bay. ”

“ Feeling hopelessly imprisoned under the monstrous car, the Senior Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He thought it was the fires of hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like a man, he found himself staring impudently close, instead, into the White Linen Nurse’s furiously flushed face, which lay cuddled on one plump cheek, staring impudently close at him. ”

“ Something has developed in the English social consciousness a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome, and the Riviera, I realized clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament of the Italian evolving to perfection under his brilliant skies. The wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. ”

“ The demand of the people for the heritage of the bosses is not short of revolution. The rebellious din of frantic impressionistic groups is nothing if not strenuous protest against a frozen art. The changed Sabbath and the tempered sermon mark the coldly critical appraisement of religious creeds. And science, meantime, straining and sweating under the lash of progress, is passing from wonder unto wonder.
Perhaps Mr. Gilder’s period of literary flowering, though surely coming, must be postponed another decade. The need of the moment is to discover where we are, what is accomplishing about us. ”

“ I am nevertheless firm in my conviction that, while it is a grievous thing to contemplate the two great English-speaking peoples of the world as being otherwise than friendly competitors in the onward march of civilization, and strenuous and worthy rivals in all the arts of peace, there is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice, and the consequent loss of National self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness. ”

“ Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? ”

“ When a man is dead, it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky; but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem’s face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem’s face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it.
“Oh, Jem! Jem!” she cried. ”

“ Then, as the gang-plank, at a whistle from the quarterdeck, is about to be lifted, shrieks from the quay indicate the belated arrival of a barrel, a pig, or some stout passenger waving breathlessly hand-bag and umbrella. At last the bateau glides on toward Murray Bay. The same bustle which characterized the arrival at Bay St. Paul, but tempered by a higher civilization, marks the arrival at Murray Bay. The custom-house is a mere amiable ceremony, and the traveler is at once confronted with his first exercise of choice: “Will monsieur have a calèche or a planche?” ”

“ She sits in her cottage there, and she just knows things and sees through people in a way that’d be almost unearthly, if she wasn’t a good old person, and so respectable that there’s those that touches their hats to her as if she belonged to the gentry. She’s got a blue eye, sir.”
“Has she?” exclaimed Tembarom.
“Yes, sir. As blue as a baby’s, sir, and as clear, though she’s past eighty. Oh, sir! you can depend upon old Mrs. Hutchinson as to who’s been here, and even what they’ve thought about it. ”

“ The mass consciousness is not an adding-up, a mere summation, of the individual minds, but the creation of something entirely new. Such a crowd may be pushed into any roads; chance leaders may use or misuse its increased suggestibility for any ends. No one can foresee whether this heaping up of men will bring good or bad results. Certainly the individual level of the crowd will always be below the level of its best members. And is not a jury necessarily such a group with a mass consciousness of its own? ”