Vas deferens

“ Whenever I have, some man says, 'That girl in your front office is a thief.'" The restraint she put upon herself, the air of disdain which at all times she had found the most convenient defence, fell from her.
"It's not fair!" she cried; "it's not fair." To her mortification, the tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes, and as she fiercely tried to brush them away, to her greater anger, continued to creep down her cheeks. ”

“ I’m going to cheat you if I have to become a drunkard or a dope fiend the rest of my life! I’m not going to let a conscience, or a voice or a chuckle, drive me to insanity—or to confessing—or to suicide!”
Defoe was steady enough now, supporting himself against the upper berth. His voice grew more strident.
“No, I’m not going to let my conscience get the best of me! You thought you could keep after me endlessly, but I'll get rid of you. I’m never going to be bothered with you or your voice again! Never! Now get out of here! Get out of here, I say! ”

“ Terrible were the words of Lîr, and dark was his face as he told the king the evil thing that Eva had done. And Eva, who had thought in the madness of her jealousy that Lîr would give her all his love when he was a childless man, shrank, white and trembling, away from him when she saw the furious hatred in his eyes. Then said the king, and his anger was even as the anger of Lîr:
"The suffering of the little children who are dear to our souls shall come to an end at last. Thine shall be an eternal doom." ”

“ Speak thou the word, and her miscreant head shall roll on the floor.'
'No, your Majesty,' replied the stranger, drawing himself up. 'I will not imbrue, even by word of mouth, my hands in a woman's blood. I would not even strike her, although she has struck me more blows than I can number. She has called me a pitiful coward, and I should be a coward if I struck her again—a woman was my mother.'
'Go to—thou art a fool!' said the King; 'and thou wouldst let a fool kick thee and spit in thy face because a fool was thy father. I hope she will murder thee in her next fit of spite. ”

“ Answer me, do not these crimes exist?"
"Yes," answered Franz; "and it is to punish them that duelling is tolerated."
"Ah, duelling," cried the count; "a pleasant manner, upon my soul, of arriving at your end when that end is vengeance! A man has carried off your mistress, a man has seduced your wife, a man has dishonored your daughter; he has rendered the whole life of one who had the right to expect from heaven that portion of happiness God his promised to every one of his creatures, an existence of misery and infamy ”

“ Amadeus Voss said to Christian: “I’ll tell you exactly how you feel. You are like a man who wants to harden himself to bear cold, and suddenly strips off his garments; or like one who [42] has never drunk whiskey nor even smelt it, and suddenly pours down a bottle of the vilest sort. But you are freezing in the cold, and reeling from the liquor. And that is not the worst. The worst is that you feel a secret horror. And how could it be otherwise? The elements of which you are made are in bitter conflict with your will. You are full of horror and will not confess it to yourself. ”

“ The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent victim he made pay the penalty of his father's faults, appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow and consuming agony which, at times, strikes the heart and lacerates it with recollections of past deeds, — a laceration whose poignant pangs increase and deepen the evil till death comes. ”

“ And suddenly a sob escaped her.
“Miss Nevis!” he cried, distressed.
“Oh, I am sorry for you,” she said, “but what will this mean to your cousin's wife and child?”
For a moment anger got the better of him.
“His wife and child! And what if I should desire a wife and—and child? Miss Nevis, am I seeking anything more than the barest of justice?”
“Indeed, no. But justice is such an awful, hideous thing when it strikes the innocent along with the guilty. I sometimes think that is the real reason for representing Justice blindfolded and armed with a clumsy sword.” ”

“ Edward de Vaux, who knew his father well--though he knew not all his motives in the present instance--prepared himself to resist; for he divined, almost immediately from the beginning of Lord Dewry's discourse, what would be the end; being well aware, though he did not choose to put it exactly in such terms to his own heart, that a certain combination of vanity, pride, selfishness, and remorselessness in the bosom of his worthy parent, made him the exact person to resent highly even a slight offence, and to treasure long hatred for a casual word. ”

“ Horrid! horrid is it to say, that the world should take unto itself that awful power claimed by Almighty Omniscience, of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and of making the guiltless offspring more than share the punishment inflicted on the offending parent! But so De Vaux felt that the world does, and that, in his instance, it was not alone the usual contemptible sneer, or still more contemptible neglect, that he was destined to meet ”

“ The mother's eyes were full of tears.
"I once knew a man," continued the little priest, glancing to a side aisle where he had noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each other, "who was carefully taught, from infancy to manhood, this single only principle of life: defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not even gain; but defiance: defiance to God, defiance to man, defiance to nature, defiance to reason; defiance and defiance and defiance."
"He is going to tell it!" murmured Evariste to Jean.
"This man," continued Père Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last a pirate in the Gulf of Mexico. ”

“ I fear there is some trouble gnawing at your heart."
"There is," he was answered, icily.
"Have you wronged some one, then, and are these thoughts which vex you feelings of remorse and guilt?"
"Wronged some one!" the sick man fairly roared, gripping the arms of his chair and gasping for breath in the excitement which the question brought on. "Not I! I have been wronged! No one has ever b-b-been wronged as I have. I have nourished vipers in my b-b-bosom and been stung by them. I have sown love and reaped hate. I have been robbed, deceived and betrayed! My wife is gone! My health is gone! ”

“ He was irritated by Val's grave superior dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the human heart and quick to reassert itself at any age: in the boy who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men. ”

“ Anger, hatred, malice, even active scorn itself, man can bear or retort; but utter indifference is more galling still. So Lord Dewry found it; and throwing open the door with a degree of force that made sundry of the smaller articles of furniture dance about the room, he issued forth in search of his carriage, with wounded pride and diminished self-importance.
Gliding gracefully down the corridor towards the breakfast-room was, at that very moment, Marian de Vaux, his niece ”

“ Nor will I frame myself to such as use,
With calm consent, to suffer such despite;
No quiet sleep shall once possess mine eye
Till Wit have wrought his will on Injury.
My heart shall fail, and hand shall lose his force,
But some device shall pay Despite his due;
And Fury shall consume my careful corse,
Or raze the ground whereon my sorrow grew.
Lo, thus in rage of ruthful mind refus’d,
I rest reveng’d on whom I am abus’d.
This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ But hear what I have seen more," he continued with a rising tone, while his eye flashed, his dark cheek flushed, and his brows knit together--"hear what I have seen more, William de Vaux, and then see whether I ought to care for anything else after. I have seen my people mock my care, and refuse my counsels! I have seen one of my own tribe betray me, in order to liberate himself! I have seen the wife of my bosom take part in the scheme for delivering me over to imprisonment and death, by the means of my best affections! ”

“ First of all, long ago it seemed now, he had allowed to be destroyed that first instinctive purity, that fragile, delicate innocence which dies young in almost every human being, and that one sees evaporating under the earliest taint of vice with a smile partly of contempt, partly of pity, partly of genuine regret. ”

“ I will not therefore stifle a confession which covers me with shame; But permit me to comprise it in as few words as possible.
“I was born in Strasbourg of respectable Parents; Their names I must at present conceal: My Father still lives, and deserves not to be involved in my infamy; If you grant my request, you shall be informed of my family name. A Villain made himself Master of my affections, and to follow him I quitted my Father’s House. Yet though my passions overpowered my virtue, I sank not into that degeneracy of vice, but too commonly the lot of Women who make the first false step. ”

“ It was not alone that De Vaux, as is common--we might almost say universal--among men, possessed more physical than moral courage; that he feared the fierce and angry mood of his father, irritated as he had been by late opposition, and loved not to venture upon a discussion with him, which would rouse every dark and stormy passion into fiery activity; but he feared himself also: he feared that anguish and anger, and the haughty irritation with which he was sure to be encountered, might make him forget himself, and say words that no after-sorrow could recall. ”

“ Oh, I would fight for such a cause; but in return for a slow, profound, eternal torture, I would give back the same, were it possible; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as the Orientalists say, — our masters in everything, — those favored creatures who have formed for themselves a life of dreams and a paradise of realities."
"But," said Franz to the count, "with this theory, which renders you at once judge and executioner of your own cause, it would be difficult to adopt a course that would forever prevent your falling under the power of the law. Hatred is blind, rage carries you away ”

“ It seemed as if all the disguises of vice were thrown off at once, and that iniquity stood forth in its own true and glaring livery. I do not believe that the heart can ever experience a ruder shock than when an unfledged criminal first hears himself welcomed into the “Masonry” of guilt. To be claimed by such associates as a fellow-laborer, to be received as one of the brethren into the guild of vice, is really an awful blow to one's self-esteem and respect ”

“ Pray Heaven he would not raise such a tornado about their ears as would bring ruin on an entire class. Given that many of the class had sinned grievously and often, that was no reason for confounding the guiltless with the guilty. The peasantry were so crassly ignorant and so oafishly benighted--so ready in these days to believe the worst--that they might choose to look on old De Vaux as an accomplice of the Lorge people, and wreak vengeance on him and his. ”

“ The baron proudly bore the threatening and implacable glance.
“I thought that a man was born to me in my house,” said he: “a man who would cut out the tongue of the first knave who dared to tell of dishonor to the Taverney Redcastles.”
“Sometimes the shame comes from an inevitable misfortune, sir, and that is the case of my sister and myself.”
“I pass to the lady. If according to my reasoning, a man ought to attack the dagger, the woman should await it with a firm foot. Where would be the triumph of virtue unless it meets and defeats vice? ”

“ Ah, Miss Villars, it was dreadful, and I often felt inclined to throw myself at his feet and tell him all about Frederick; but the thought of my poor Papa, and the recollection of the money for the estate, which could not be paid back again, sealed my lips, and I went on day after day deceiving the best of men. You see, I’d gone too far to recede, and oh, my dear, that is the awful penalty one always pays for one’s wickedness—if you begin by deceiving anyone, you’re obliged to go on, and on, and on, from one deception to another, until you feel the basest creature in the world. ”

“ You see, Manuel had overheard you say, in your sleep, that you convicted an innocent man of murder. So I knew your conscience—”
“Are you trying to be my conscience? Are you trying to plague me into confessing? Are you—”
“No,” answered the Voice, “unless you choose to call me your conscience. I’m willing. You seem to be in need of one. Do you know, Mr. Defoe,” and the Voice took on a more affable tone, “you have been fearfully distracted the last few weeks or months. You need a rest—a long rest!”
Defoe was silent, hunched in the retreat of the berth. He had no fight left in him. ”

“ Grey, will you forget all that has passed to-day? Will you try never to think of it again?”
“On condition that you never repeat the offence.”
“You do not despise me?”
“No.”
“You pity me?”
“I pity any human being who is so unfortunate as to possess your wilful, perverse, passionate disposition. Unless you overcome this dangerous tendency of character, you may expect only wretchedness and humiliation in coming years. I am sincerely sorry for you, but I tell you unhesitatingly, that I find it difficult to tolerate your grave and obtrusive faults.” ”