Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given point in a sentimental relation;.
The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.
You see, Monsieur, it’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence?
Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before – I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.” Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.
They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can’t say as they’ve hurried much to make our acquaintance.
But, my dear, it’s just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It’s because we know we can’t hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...
That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.
Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High Point.
Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.
What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?
Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.
She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.
The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.
It was characteristic of her that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the passionate desire to obliterate, to “get even” with them, was always among the latent incentives of her conduct.
I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts – I hate ugliness, you know.
What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?
But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided.
That Greiner house, now – a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before.
Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.
To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.