Don’t let us be like all the others! she protested.
The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth?
The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in – two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.
There were moments of overwhelming lassitude, when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.
But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather’s whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.
For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.
Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one’s sleeves and go down into the muck.
She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple.
The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s only means of quick communication! “Chicago wants you.
It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful.
What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?
But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop.
He started to walk across the Common, and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a gray silk sunshade over her head – how could he have ever imagined her with a pink one?
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You’re so shy, and yet you’re so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again – or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.
Nick had secretly wearied, if not of his wife, at least of the life that their marriage compelled him to lead. His passion was not strong enough-had never been strong enough – to outweigh his prejudices, scruples, principles, or whatever one chose to call them. Susy’s dignity might go up like tinder in the blaze of her love; but his was made of a less combustible substance.
What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?
I wonder what her fate will be?’’ ‘‘What we’ve all contrived to make it,’’ he.
But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in its mother’s arms.
The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.
Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.