"Evylyn, I'm going to give a present that's as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through."
The first odour of massed cigars began to drift in.
She knew it lay there in the big bowl with her name in ink on the outside and her soul's death within.
'Don't they usually go together?'
They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings colour into life; they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths.
Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this new-found and unquestionable freedom.
Love Is fragile - she was thinking - but perhaps the pleces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.
The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky.
They had become a race apart, these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed by an early whim of nature, which on second thought had abandoned them to struggle and extermination.
The frame gleamed faintly with thrice-reflected moonlight - within was a blurred shadow of a face that he saw he did not know.
He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in the Caucasus.
Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain.
Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.
'You've got an awfully kissable mouth,' he began quietly.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
'I didn't hint anything, said Marjorie succinctly. 'I said, as I remember, that it was better to wear a becoming dress three times straight than to alternate it with two frights.'
'All right — I'll just give you a few examples now. First, you have no ease of manner. Why? Because you're never sure about your personal appearance. When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm. The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have!'
He threatened to leave when he had no intention of leaving, and refused to go when she told him that, after all, it was best that he should.
This night's dusk would cover up forever the sun and the trees and the flowers and laughter of his young world.
He had lost part of an eyebrow somewhere, and he still wore an elastic bandage on his knee, but he was too young not to realize that on the steamer many women had looked at him with unusual tributary interest.
There was no triumph, after all, without a girl concerned, and if he did not lay his spoils at her feet he could at least hold them for a passing moment before her eyes.
He had not remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow pale and his voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.
There had never been anything casual in their previous relations - it didn't seem possible that people in this position would talk about the weather.
He had traded his youth for strength and carved success out of despair. But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love.
But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours.
There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
Then I gave her up to the bright restless sea of the dance, where she moved in an eddy of her own among the pleasant islands of coloured favours set out on tables and the south winds from the brasses moaning across the hall.
He had felt that they both tolerated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and life, and that if they rushed towards each other there would be a romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity.
She stood a long time with her back to him at one point, and when she turned at length, their eyes swept past each other's, brushing like bird wings.
One is a citizen of a commonwealth smaller than Andorra. One is no longer so sure of anything. Curiously unmoved the men at the purser's desk, cell-like the cabin, disdainful the eyes of voyagers and their friends. solemn the officer who stands on the deserted promenade deck thinking something of his own as he stares at the crowd below.
To avoid the ominous possibility of being put wise to himself in the lobby, Basil uneasily changed the subject.
He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.
City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden as Timbuktu.
They were precious because he had taken the time to write them; they were eloquent in the very postage stamp because he used so few.
There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry.
He took both the bruise and the desire with him to New York next morning: the bruise faded, but the desire remained.
Girls had become gossamer again, perambulatory flora; such lovely fluttering dresses in the bright noon wind.