William MacLeod Raine

“ Now I've offered you a chance to live, really to share in the big things that are doing in the world. I've been magnanimous enough to forget you're living on an immense fortune you never earned, and you try to freeze me with your society stare. Forget it, Miss Melhuish. I grant you people aren't all equal. God didn't make them that way. But don't think for a moment that the butterflies are the superior ones. I take my hat off to the folks that do the world's work. There's a plain name for your class, ma'am, and it is 'loafer.'”
The whole emphasis of your environment has been upon money ”

“ Wearily Mr. Sloane announced his intention of going with the Never Sweat party. The thing was perfectly absurd, of course, quite impossible in fact, but this mining superintendent, Brand's, influence over Miss Melhuish was beginning to trouble him. He thought it just as well not to give them another opportunity to be alone together. The girl was at a romantic age and was likely to get odd notions into her head. It would cost him some rheumatic twinges perhaps, but a chap had to make some concessions when he intended to marry an independent sort of girl like Wilma. ”

“ What have you to offer an honest lover? Your fortune and your beauty principally, and both of them are accidents. What claim have you on the world? What service have you ever given it? You can't even wait on yourself. ”

“ You're like a baby that has to be fed from a bottle. You don't pay your honest stint of service. You're a drone in the great hive of workers, a wretched little butterfly, a fluffy kitten, good for nothing but to cuddle. ”

“ Brand let his inscrutable gaze fall on the young man, appraised him a tailor's model and a saphead—somewhat unjustly it must be admitted—and let his gaze drift into space. Mr. Sloane had been weighed and found wanting, tried by the standards of the man from the West. ”

“ If I'm on the way to success it is because I've taken the world by the throat with a strangle-hold. Out in my country a man has to stand on his feet. He gets there if he's strong; he goes to the wall if he's weak. He isn't judged by the money he's got, unless that is a test of the stuff in him. ”

“ His alert eyes ran quietly over the long lines of her slender fullness. “You are beautifully finished, of course; no expense spared to hide the real you behind the ivory enamel. I'm only your mining superintendent come out of the West on business (which you say you detest) , but I shouldn't have done you the honor to ask you to be my wife if I hadn't seen, for just an instant the real girl behind all this mummery of caste. ”

“ Some fifty yards in advance their electric searchlight flashed notice of their presence. Their voices drifted back to him, hers quick and eager, the man's quiet and slow.
“Thank God, we'll be on the way back to civilization to-morrow and Mr. Brand will be wiped off the map,” the clubman comforted himself.
He went forward to examine the cave-in
Brand dragged her back against the breast of the tunnel
Just now, however, Philip Brand was very much on the map for Wilma Melhuish. ”