William Dean Howells

“ Miss Ramsey, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the most barefaced hypocrite, and—and—I don't know what—you are very much mistaken." ”

“ Miss Ramsey: "I should think any self-respecting person would know. I'm not a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously. As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you think of me!" ”

“ There was a sort of relief in that, but the double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again, and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in the recent disaster had paid. ”

“ Fountain, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table, under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to have some leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you; it's the happy ones. ”

“ Ashley, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I will have a cocktail, after all."
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley!"
Ashley, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one." He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes—very reviving. ”

“ The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit, said she did not see how she could go with her; she was expected at home herself.
"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where from time to time colored people—sometimes of one sex, sometimes of another—went in or came out. ”

“ Miss Ramsey: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be something explicit. As you say, I must do something to cure him of his fancy—his perfidy—and make him glad to go back to her."
Miss Garnett: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"
[Pg 297] Miss Ramsey: "I've no wish to punish him."
Miss Garnett: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. I should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic. It is drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like to listen at the door! ”

“ She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in his way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk [Pg 21] the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen, effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. ”

“ This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.
"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable evil?"
The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken a liberty with this man's wife) , "Why, don't we?"
"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?" ”

“ I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double nightmare, waking and sleeping."
"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're making for them."
"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for her. ”

“ A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to their children in New York or Boston. ”

“ Fountain: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and presses her toward the door.
Mrs. Fountain: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll tell you: next year, I will do my Christmas shopping in July. It's the only way." ”

“ Gibby to send you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when a woman could send you anything so—intimate. What are you staring at with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by—"
Fountain, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be for Mrs. Clarence Fountain."
Mrs. Fountain, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair what else to get me. ”

“ They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think—" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."
"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that! I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. ”

“ Did mere motherhood hallow that [Pg 104] old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? ”

“ Miss Garnett: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act. How do you suppose people do, generally?"
Miss Garnett: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them, after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not." ”

“ That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is the mother of divorce?"
"Whichever you like."
"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. ”

“ She became known as the Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else of her you knew that she was going out to them. ”

“ When I'm on foot I feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's "Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and sex ought to be killed." ”

“ Fountain: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow. As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks up and down. "Heigh?"
Mrs. Fountain: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas is that it rouses up all your old friends."
Fountain: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building the joke to go with it." ”

“ You all know that it is the caprice of chance encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. ”

“ Fountain: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity you. You ought to bear up against them. If I gave way! You must think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't all a vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you down. It's the shopping that's worn you out ”

“ Mrs. Fountain: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."
Fountain, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"
II MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
Watkins, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. ”

“ Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional lapses into extreme girlhood. ”

“ He draws a hassock up in front of her, and sits on it.
Ashley: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it literally any more, you know."
Miss Ramsey, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did, and"—deeply murmurous—"I don't wish to despise you."
Ashley: "No, I understand that. You merely wish me to despise you. But why?"
Miss Ramsey, nervously: "You know."
Ashley: "But I don't know—Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will allow me to express myself so fully. How should I know?"
Miss Ramsey: "I've told you."
Ashley: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" ”

“ Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. ”

“ Erlcort recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. ”