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twg_000000047800 | of a flag defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to give a soldier! To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers, receding in that great impersonal wave | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047801 | of olive drab. And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams break, excoriating. For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047802 | of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk crowds. From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of Jimmie Batch's glance roving for | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047803 | her, but to all purports his eye was solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost swayback. Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047804 | over which she seemed to have no control. "'By, Jimmie! So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!" Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. "You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!" At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it. She | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047805 | was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the Bargain-Basement. II SIEVE OF FULFILMENT How constant a stream is the runnel of men's small affairs! Dynasties may totter and half the world bleed to death, but one or the other corner _ptisserie_ goes on forever. At a moment when the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047806 | shadow of world-war was over the country like a pair of black wings lowering Mrs. Harry Ross, who swooned at the sight of blood from a penknife scratch down the hand of her son, but yawned over the head-line statistics of the casualties at Verdun, lifted a lid from a pot that exuded immediate savory fumes, prodded with a fork | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047807 | at its content, her concern boiled down to deal solely with stew. An alarm-clock on a small shelf edged in scalloped white oilcloth ticked with spick-and-span precision into a kitchen so correspondingly spick and span that even its silence smelled scoured, rows of tins shining into it. A dun-colored kind of dusk, soot floating in it, began to filter down | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047808 | the air-shaft, dimming them. Mrs. Ross lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet. So short that in the long run she wormed first through a crowd, she was full of the genial curves that, though they bespoke three lumps in her coffee in an elevator and escalator age, had not yet reached uncongenial proportions. In fact, now, brushing with her | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047809 | bare forearm across her moistly pink face, she was like Flora, who, rather than fade, became buxom. A door slammed in an outer hall, as she was still stirring and looking down into the stew. "Edwin!" "Yes, mother." "Don't track through the parlor." "Aw!" "You hear me?" "I yain't! Gee, can't a feller walk?" "Put your books on the hat-rack." | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047810 | "I am." She supped up bird-like from the tip of her spoon, smacking for flavor. "I made you an asafetida-bag, Edwin, it's in your drawer. Don't you leave this house to-morrow without it on." "Aw-w-w-w-w!" "It don't smell." "Where's my stamp-book?" "On your table, where it belongs." "Gee whiz! if you got my Argentine stamps mixed!" "Get washed." "Where's my | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047811 | batteries?" "Under your bed, where they belong." "I'm hungry." "Your father'll be home any minute now. Don't spoil your appetite." "I got ninety in manual training, mother." "Did yuh, Edwin?" "All the other fellows only got seventy and eighty." "Mamma's boy leads 'em." He entered at that, submitting to a kiss upon an averted cheek. "See what mother's fixed for | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047812 | you!" "M-m-m-m! fritters!" "Don't touch!" "M-m-m-m--lamb stew!" "I shopped all morning to get okra to go in it for your father." "M-m-m-m-m!" She tiptoed up to kiss him again, this time at the back of the neck, carefully averting her floury hands. "Mamma's boy! I made you three pen-wipers to-day out of the old red table-cover." "Aw, fellers don't use | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047813 | pen-wipers!" He set up a jiggling, his great feet coming down with a clatter. "Stop!" "Can't I jig?" "No; not with neighbors underneath." He flopped down, hooking his heels in the chair-rung. At sixteen's stage of cruel hazing into man's estate Edwin Ross, whose voice, all in a breath, could slip up from the quality of rock in the drilling | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047814 | to the more brittle octave of early-morning milk-bottles, wore a nine shoe and a thirteen collar. His first long trousers were let down and taken in. His second taken up and let out. When shaving promised to become a manly accomplishment, his complexion suddenly clouded, postponing that event until long after it had become a hirsute necessity. When he smiled | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047815 | apoplectically above his first waistcoat and detachable collar, his Adam's apple and his mother's heart fluttered. "Blow-cat Dennis is going to City College." "Who's he?" "A feller." "Quit crackin' your knuckles." "He only got seventy in manual training." "Tell them things to your father, Edwin; I 'ain't got the say-so." "His father's only a bookkeeper, too, and they live 'way | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047816 | up on a Hundred and Forty-fourth near Third." "I'm willing to scrimp and save for it, Edwin; but in the end I haven't got the say-so, and you know it." "The boys that are going to college got to register now for the High School College Society." "Your father, Edwin, is the one to tell that to." "Other fellers' mothers | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047817 | put in a word for 'em." "I do, Edwin; you know I do! It only aggravates him--There's papa now, Edwin, coming in. Help mamma dish up. Put this soup at papa's place and this at yours. There's only two plates left from last night." In Mrs. Ross's dining-room, a red-glass dome, swung by a chain over the round table, illuminated | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047818 | its white napery and decently flowered china. Beside the window looking out upon a gray-brick wall almost within reach, a canary with a white-fluted curtain about the cage dozed headless. Beside that window, covered in flowered chintz, a sewing-machine that could collapse to a table; a golden-oak sideboard laid out in pressed glassware. A homely simplicity here saved by chance | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047819 | or chintz from the simply homely. Mr. Harry Ross drew up immediately beside the spread table, jerking open his newspaper and, head thrown back, read slantingly down at the head-lines. "Hello, pop!" "Hello, son!" "Watch out!" "Hah--that's the stuff! Don't spill!" He jammed the newspaper between his and the chair back, shoving in closer to the table. He was blond | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047820 | to ashiness, so that the slicked-back hair might or might not be graying. Pink-shaved, unlined, nose-glasses polished to sparkle, he was ten years his wife's senior and looked those ten years younger. Clerks and clergymen somehow maintain that youth of the flesh, as if life had preserved them in alcohol or shaving-lotion. Mrs. Ross entered then in her crisp but | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047821 | faded house dress, her round, intent face still moistly pink, two steaming dishes held out. He did not rise, but reached up to kiss her as she passed. "Burnt your soup a little to-night, mother." She sat down opposite, breathing deeply outward, spreading her napkin out across her lap. "It was Edwin coming in from school and getting me worked | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047822 | up with his talk about--about--" "What?" "Nothing. Edwin, run out and bring papa the paprika to take the burnt taste out. I turned all the cuffs on your shirts to-day, Harry." "Lordy! if you ain't fixing at one thing, you're fixing another." "Anything new?" He was well over his soup now, drinking in long draughts from the tip of his | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047823 | spoon. "News! In A. E. Unger's office, a man don't get his nose far enough up from the ledger to even smell news." "I see Goldfinch & Goetz failed." "Could have told 'em they'd go under, trying to put on a spectacular show written in verse. That same show boiled down to good Forty-second Street lingo with some good shapes | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047824 | and a proposition like Alma Zitelle to lift it from poetry to punch has a world of money in it for somebody. A war spectacular show filled with sure-fire patriotic lines, a bunch of show-girl battalions, and a figure like Alma Zitelle's for the Goddess of Liberty--a world of money, I tell you!" "Honest, Harry?" "That trench scene they built | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047825 | for that show is as fine a contrivance as I've ever seen of the kind. What did they do? Set it to a lot of music without a hum or a ankle in it. A few classy nurses like the Mercy Militia Sextet, some live, grand-old-flag tunes by Harry Mordelle, and there's a half a million dollars in that show. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047826 | Unger thinks I'm crazy when I try to get him interested, but I--" "I got ninety in manual training to-day, pop." "That's good, son. Little more of that stew, mother?" "Unger isn't so smart, honey, he can't afford to take a tip off you once in a while: you've proved that to him." "Yes, but go tell him so." "He'll | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047827 | live to see the day he's got to give you credit for being the first to see money in 'Pan-America.'" "Credit? Huh! to hear him tell it, he was born with that idea in his bullet head." "I'd like to hear him say it to me, if ever I lay eyes on him, that it wasn't you who begged him | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047828 | to get into it." "I'll show 'em some day in that office that I can pick the winners for myself, as well as for the other fellow. Believe me, Unger hasn't raised me to fifty a week for my fancy bookkeeping, and he knows it, and, what's more, he knows I know he knows it." "The fellers that are goin' | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047829 | to college next term have to register for the High School College Society, pop--dollar dues." "Well, you aren't going to college, and that's where you and I save a hundred cents on the dollar. Little more gravy, mother." The muscles of Edwin's face relaxed, his mouth dropping to a pout, the crude features quivering. "Aw, pop, a feller nowadays without | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047830 | a college education don't stand a show." "He don't, don't he? I know one who will." Edwin threw a quivering glance to his mother and gulped through a constricted throat. "Mother says I--I can go if only you--" "Your mother'd say you could have the moon, too, if she had to climb a greased pole to get it. She'd start | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047831 | weaving door-mats for the Cingalese Hottentots if she thought they needed 'em." "But, Harry, he--" "Your mother 'ain't got the bills of this shebang to worry about, and your mother don't mind having a college sissy a-laying around the house to support five years longer. I do." "It's the free City College, pop." "You got a better education now than | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047832 | nine boys out of ten. If you ain't man enough to want to get out after four years of high school and hustle for a living, you got to be shown the way out. I started when I was in short pants, and you're no better than your father. Your mother sold notions and axle-grease in an up-State general store | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047833 | up to the day she married. Now cut out the college talk you been springing on me lately. I won't have it--you hear? You're a poor man's son, and the sooner you make up your mind to it the better. Pass the chow-chow, mother." Nervousness had laid hold of her so that in and out among the dishes her hand | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047834 | trembled. "You see, Harry, it's the free City College, and--" "I know that free talk. So was high school free when you talked me into it, but if it ain't one thing it's been another. Cadet uniform, football suit--" "The child's got talent for invention, Harry; his manual-training teacher told me his air-ship model was--" "I got ninety in manual | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047835 | training when the other fellers only got seventy." "I guess you're looking for another case like your father, sitting penniless around the house, tinkering on inventions up to the day he died." "Pa never had the business push, Harry. You know yourself his churn was ready for the market before the Peerless beat him in on it." "Well, your son | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047836 | is going to get the business push trained into him. No boy of mine with a poor daddy eats up four years of his life and my salary training to be a college sissy. That's for the rich men's sons. That's for the Clarence Ungers." "I'll pay it back some day, pop; I--." "They all say that." "If it's the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047837 | money, Harry, maybe I can--" "If it didn't cost a cent, I wouldn't have it. Now cut it out--you hear? Quick!" Edwin Ross pushed back from the table, struggling and choking against impending tears. "Well, then, I--I--" "And no shuffling of feet, neither!" "He didn't shuffle, Harry; it's just his feet growing so fast he can't manage them." "Well, just | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047838 | the samey, I--I ain't going into the theayter business. I--I--" Mr. Ross flung down his napkin, facing him. "You're going where I put you, young man. You're going to get the right kind of a start that I didn't get in the biggest money-making business in the world." "I won't. I'll get me a job in an aeroplane-factory." His father's | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047839 | palm came down with a small crash, shivering the china. "By Gad! you take that impudence out of your voice to me or I'll rawhide it out!" "Harry!" "Leave the table!" "Harry, he's only a child--" "Go to your room!" His heavy, unformed lips now trembling frankly against the tears he tried so furiously to resist, Edwin charged with lowered | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047840 | head from the room, sobs escaping in raw gutturals. Mr. Ross came back to his plate, breathing heavily, fist, with a knife upright in it, coming down again on the table, his mouth open, to facilitate labored breathing. "By Heaven! I'll cowhide that boy to his senses! I've never laid hand on him yet, but he ain't too old. I'll | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047841 | get him down to common sense, if I got to break a rod over him." Handkerchief against trembling lips, Mrs. Ross looked after the vanished form, eyes brimming. "Harry, you--you're so rough with him." "I'll be rougher yet before I'm through." "He's only a--" "He's rewarding the way you scrimped to pay his expenses for nonsense clubs and societies by | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047842 | asking you to do it another four years. You're getting your thanks now. College! Well, not if the court knows it--" "He's got talent, Harry; his teacher says he--" "So'd your father have talent." "If pa hadn't lost his eye in the Civil War--" "I'm going to put my son's talent where I can see a future for it." "He's | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047843 | ambitious, Harry." "So'm I--to see my son trained to be something besides a looney inventor like his grandfather before him." "It's all I want in life, Harry, to see my two boys of you happy." "It's your woman-ideas I got to blame for this. I want you to stop, Millie, putting rich man's ideas in his head. You hear? I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047844 | won't stand for it." "Harry, if--if it's the money, maybe I could manage--" "Yes--and scrimp and save and scrooge along without a laundress another four years, and do his washing and--" "I--could fix the money part, Harry--easy." He regarded her with his jaw dropped in the act of chewing. "By Gad! where do you plant it?" "It--it's the way I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047845 | scrimp, Harry. Another woman would spend it on clothes or--a servant--or matines. It ain't hard for a home body like me to save, Harry." He reached across the table for her wrist. "Poor little soul," he said, "you don't see day-light." "Let him go, Harry, if--if he wants it. I can manage the money." His scowl returned, darkening him. "No. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047846 | A. E. Unger never seen the inside of a high school, much less a college, and I guess he's made as good a pile as most. I've worked for the butcher and the landlord all my life, and now I ain't going to begin being a slave to my boy. There's been two or three times in my life where, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047847 | for want of a few dirty dollars to make a right start, I'd be, a rich man to-day. My boy's going to get that right start." "But, Harry, college will--" "I seen money in 'Pan-America' long before Unger ever dreamed of producing it. I sicked him onto 'The Official Chaperon' when every manager in town had turned it down. I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047848 | went down and seen 'em doing 'The White Elephant' in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047849 | the rut of a salaried man. Well, where it 'ain't got me it's going to get my son. I'm missing a chance, to-day that, mark my word, would make me a rich man but for want of a few--" "Harry, you mean that?" "My hunch never fails me." She was leaning across the table, her hands clasping its edge, her | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047850 | small, plump face even pinker. He threw out his legs beneath the table and sat back, hands deep in pockets, and a toothpick hanging limp from between lips that were sagging. "Gad! if I had my life to live over again as a salaried man, I'd--I'd hang myself first! The way to start a boy to a million dollars in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047851 | this business is to start him young in the producing-end of a strong firm." "You--got faith in this Goldfinch & Goetz failure like you had in 'Pan-America' and 'The Chaperon,' Harry?" "I said it five years ago and it come to pass. I say it now. For want of a few dirty dollars I'm a poor man till I die." | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047852 | "How--many dollars, Harry?" "Don't make me say it, Millie--it makes me sick to my stummick. Three thousand dollars would buy the whole spectacle to save it from the storehouse. I tried Charley Ryan--he wouldn't risk a ten-spot on a failure." "Harry, I--oh, Harry--" "Why, mother, what's the matter? You been overworking again, ironing my shirts and collars when they ought | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047853 | to go to the laundry? You--" "Harry, what would you say if--if I was to tell you something?" "What is it, mother? You better get Annie in on Mondays. We 'ain't got any more to show without her than with her." "Harry, we--have!" "Well, you just had an instance of the thanks you get." "Harry, what--what would you say if | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047854 | I could let you have nearly all of that three thousand?" He regarded her above the flare of a match to his cigar-end. "Huh?" "If I could let you have twenty-six hundred seventeen dollars and about fifty cents of it?" He sat well up, the light reflecting in points off his polished glasses. "Mother, you're joking!" Her hands were out | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047855 | across the table now, almost reaching his, her face close and screwed under the lights. "When--when you lost out that time five years ago on 'Pan-America' and I seen how Linger made a fortune out of it, I says to myself, 'It can never happen again.' You remember the next January when you got your raise to fifty and I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047856 | wouldn't move out of this flat, and instead gave up having Annie in, that was what I had in my head, Harry. It wasn't only for sending Edwin to high school; it was for--my other boy, too, Harry, so it couldn't happen again." "Millie, you mean--" "You ain't got much idea, Harry, of what I been doing. You don't know | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047857 | it, honey, but, honest, I ain't bought a stitch of new clothes for five years. You know I ain't, somehow--made friends for myself since we moved here." "It's the hard shell town of the world!" "You ain't had time, Harry, to ask yourself what becomes of the house allowance, with me stinting so. Why, I--I won't spend car fare, Harry, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047858 | since 'Pan-America,' if I can help it. This meal I served up here t-night, with all the high cost of living, didn't cost us two thirds what it might if--if I didn't have it all figured up. Where do you think your laundry-money that I've been saving goes, Harry? The marmalade-money I made the last two Christmases? The velvet muff | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047859 | I made myself out of the fur-money you give me? It's all in the Farmers' Trust, Harry. With the two hundred and ten I had to start with five years ago, it's twenty-six hundred and seventeen dollars and fifty cents now. I've been saving it for this kind of a minute, Harry. When it got three thousand, I was going | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047860 | to tell you, anyways. Is that enough, Harry, to do the Goldfinch-Goetz spectacle on your own hook? Is it, Harry?" He regarded her in a heavy-jawed kind of stupefaction. "Woman alive!" he said. "Great Heavens, woman alive!" "It's in the bank, waiting, Harry--all for you." "Why, Millie, I--I don't know what to say." "I want you to have it, Harry. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047861 | It's yours. Out of your pocket, back into it. You got capital to start with now." "I--Why, I can't take that money, Millie, from you!" "From your wife? When she stinted and scrimped and saved on shoe-leather for the happiness of it?" "Why, this is no sure thing I got on the brain." "Nothing is." "I got nothing but my | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047862 | own judgment to rely on." "You been right three times, Harry." "There's not as big a gamble in the world as the show business. I can't take your savings, mother." "Harry, if--if you don't, I'll tear it up. It's what I've worked for. I'm too tired, Harry, to stand much. If you don't take it, I--I'm too tired, Harry, to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047863 | stand it." "But, mother--" "I couldn't stand it, I tell you," she said, the tears now bursting and flowing down over her cheeks. "Why, Millie, you mustn't cry! I 'ain't seen you cry in years. Millie! my God! I can't get my thoughts together! Me to own a show after all these years; me to--" "Don't you think it means | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047864 | something to me, too, Harry?" "I can't lose, Millie. Even if this country gets drawn into the war, there's a mint of money in that show as I see it. It'll help the people. The people of this country need to have their patriotism tickled." "All my life, Harry, I've wanted a gold-mesh bag with a row of sapphires and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047865 | diamonds across the top--" "I'm going to make it the kind of show that 'Dixie' was a song--" "And a gold-colored bird-of-paradise for a black-velvet hat, all my life, Harry--" "With Alma Zitelle in the part--" "Is it her picture I found in your drawer the other day, Harry, cut out from a Sunday newspaper?" "One and the same. I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047866 | been watching her. There's a world of money in that woman, whoever she is. She's eccentric and they make her play straight, but if I could get hold of her--My God! Millie, I--I can't believe things!" She rose, coming round to lay her arms across his shoulders. "We'll be rich, maybe, Harry--" "I've picked the winners for the other fellows | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047867 | every time, Mil." "Anyhow, it's worth the gamble, Harry." "I got a nose for what the people want. I've never been able to prove it from a high stool, but I'll show 'em now--by God! I'll show 'em now!" He sprang up, pulling the white table-cloth awry and folding her into his embrace. "I'll show 'em." She leaned from him, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047868 | her two hands against his chest, head thrown back and eyes up to him. "We--can educate our boy, then, Harry, like--like a rich man's son." "We ain't rich yet." "Promise me, Harry, if we are--promise me that, Harry. It's the only promise I ask out of it. Whatever comes, if we win or lose, our boy can have college if | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047869 | he wants." He held her close, his head up and gazing beyond her. "With a rich daddy my boy can go to college like the best of 'em." "Promise me that, Harry." "I promise, Millie." He released her then, feeling for an envelope in an inner pocket, and, standing there above the disarrayed dinner-table, executed some rapid figures across the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047870 | back of it. She stood for a moment regarding him, hands pressed against the sting of her cheeks, tears flowing down over her smile. Then she took up the plate of cloying fritters and tiptoed out, opening softly the door to a slit of a room across the hall. In the patch of light let in by that opened door, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047871 | drawn up before a small table, face toward her ravaged with recent tears, and lips almost quivering, her son lay in the ready kind of slumber youth can bring to any woe. She tiptoed up beside him, placing the plate of fritters back on a pile of books, let her hands run lightly over his hair, kissed him on each | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047872 | swollen lid. "My son! My little boy! My little boy!" Where Broadway leaves off its roof-follies and its water-dancing, its eighty-odd theaters and its very odd Hawaiian cabarets, upper Broadway, widening slightly, takes up its macadamized rush through the city in block-square apartment-houses, which rise off plate-glass foundations of the de-luxe greengrocer shops, the not-so-green beauty-parlors, and the dyeing-and-cleaning, automobile-supplies, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047873 | and confectionery establishments of middle New York. In a no-children-allowed, swimming-pool, electric-laundry, roof-garden, dogs'-playground, cold-storage apartment most recently erected on a block-square tract of upper Broadway, belonging to and named after the youngest scion of an ancestor whose cow-patches had turned to kingdoms, the fifteenth layer of this gigantic honeycomb overlooked from its seventeen outside windows the great Babylonian valley | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047874 | of the city, the wide blade of the river shining and curving slightly like an Arabian dagger, and the embankment of New Jersey's Palisades piled against the sky with the effect of angry horizon. Nights, viewed from one of the seventeen windows, it was as if the river flowed under a sullen sheath which undulated to its curves. On clear | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047875 | days it threw off light like parrying steel in sunshine. Were days when, gazing out toward it, Mrs. Ross, whose heart was like a slow ache of ever-widening area, could almost feel its laving quality and, after the passage of a tug- or pleasure-boat, the soothing folding of the water down over and upon itself. Often, with the sun setting | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047876 | pink and whole above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down, long after the glow was cold. With such a sunset already waned, and the valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047877 | into electric signs and the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under lids that were rimmed in red. Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047878 | a cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers tattooing, too, along the chair-sides. How insidiously do the years nibble in! how pussy-footed and how cocksure the crow's-feet! One morning, and the first gray hair, which has been turning from the cradle, arrives. Another, the mirror shows back a sag beneath the eyes. That sag had come now | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047879 | to Mrs. Ross, giving her eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness. The streak of quicksilver had come, too, but more successfully combated. The head lying back against the brocade chair was guilty of new gleams. Brass, with a greenish alloy. Sitting there with the look of unshed tears seeming to form a film over her gaze, it was as if | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047880 | the dusk, flowing into a silence that was solemnly shaped to receive it, folded her in, more and more obscuring her. A door opened at the far end of the room, letting in a patch of hall light and a dark figure coming into silhouette against it. "You there?" She sprang up. "Yes, Harry--yes." "Good Lord! sitting in the dark | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047881 | again!" He turned a wall key, three pink-shaded lamps, a cluster of pink-glass grapes, and a center bowl of alabaster flashing up the familiar spectacle of Louis Fourteenth and the interior decorator's turpitude; a deep-pink brocade divan backed up by a Circassian-walnut table with curly legs; a maze of smaller tables; a marble Psyche holding out the cluster of pink | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047882 | grapes; a gilt grand piano, festooned in rosebuds. Around through these Mr. Ross walked quickly, winding his hands, rubbing them. "Well, here I am!" "Had your supper--dinner, Harry?" "No. What's the idea calling me off when I got a business dinner on hand? What's the hurry call this time? I have to get back to it." She clasped her hands | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047883 | to her bare throat, swallowing with effort. "I--Harry--I--" "You've got to stop this kind of thing, Millie, getting nervous spells like all the other women do the minute they get ten cents in their pocket. I ain't got the time for it--that's all there is to it." "I can't help it, Harry. I think I must be going crazy. I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047884 | can't stop myself. All of a sudden everything comes over me. I think I must be going crazy." Her voice jerked up to an off pitch, and he flung himself down on the deep-cushioned couch, his stiff expanse of dress shirt bulging and straining at the studs. A bit redder and stouter, too, he was constantly rearing his chin away | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047885 | from the chafing edge of his collar. "O Lord!" he said. "I guess I'm let in for some cutting-up again! Well, fire away and have it over with! What's eating you this time?" She was quivering so against sobs that her lips were drawn in against her teeth by the great draught of her breathing. "I can't stand it, Harry. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047886 | I'm going crazy. I got to get relief. It's killing me--the lonesomeness--the waiting. I can't stand no more." He sat looking at a wreath of roses in the light carpet, lips compressed, beating with fist into palm. "Gad! I dunno! I give up. You're too much for me, woman." "I can't go on this way--the suspense--can't--can't." "I don't know what | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047887 | you want. God knows I give up! Thirty-eight-hundred-dollar-a-year apartment--more spending-money in a week than you can spend in a month. Clothes. Jewelry. Your son one of the high-fliers at college--his automobile--your automobile. Passes to every show in town. Gad! I can't help it if you turn it all down and sit up here moping and making it hot for me | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047888 | every time I put my foot in the place. I don't know what you want; you're one too many for me." "I can't stand--" "All of a sudden, out of a clear sky, she sends for me to come home. Second time in two weeks. No wonder, with your long face, your son lives mostly up at the college. I | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047889 | 'ain't got enough on my mind yet with the 'Manhattan Revue' opening to-morrow night. You got it too good, if you want to know it. That's what ails women when they get to cutting up like this." She was clasping and unclasping her hands, swaying, her eyes closed. "I wisht to God we was back in our little flat on | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047890 | a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street. We was happy then. It's your success has lost you for me. I ought to known it, but--I--I wanted things so for you and the boy. It's your success has lost you for me. Back there, not a supper we didn't eat together like clockwork, not a night we didn't take a walk or--" "There | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047891 | you go again! I tell you, Millie, you're going to nag me with that once too often. Then ain't now. What you homesick for? Your poor-as-a-church-mouse days? I been pretty patient these last two years, feeling like a funeral every time I put my foot in the front door--" "It ain't often you put it in." "But, mark my word, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047892 | you're going to nag me once too often!" "O God! Harry, I try to keep in! I know how wild it makes you--how busy you are, but--" "A man that's give to a woman heaven on earth like I have you! A man that started three years ago on nothing but nerve and a few dollars, and now stands on | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047893 | two feet, one of the biggest spectacle-producers in the business! By Gad! you're so darn lucky it's made a loon out of you! Get out more. Show yourself a good time. You got the means and the time. Ain't there no way to satisfy you?" "I can't do things alone all the time, Harry. I--I'm funny that way. I ain't | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047894 | a woman like that, a new-fangled one that can do things without her husband. It's the nights that kill me--the nights. The--all nights sitting here alone--waiting." "If you 'ain't learned the demands of my business by now, I'm not going over them again." "Yes; but not all--" "You ought to have some men to deal with. I'd like to see | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047895 | Mrs. Unger try to dictate to him how to run his business." "You've left me behind, Harry. I--try to keep up, but--I can't. I ain't the woman to naturally paint my hair this way. It's my trying to keep up, Harry, with you and--and--Edwin. These clothes--I ain't right in 'em, Harry; I know that. That's why I can't stand it. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047896 | The suspense. The waiting up nights. I tell you I'm going crazy. Crazy with knowing I'm left behind." "I never told you to paint up your hair like a freak." "I thought, Harry--the color--like hers--it might make me seem younger--" "You thought! You're always thinking." She stood behind him now over the couch, her hand yearning toward but not touching | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047897 | him. "O God! Harry, ain't there no way I can please you no more--no way?" "You can please me by acting like a human being and not getting me home on wild-goose chases like this." "But I can't stand it, Harry! The quiet. Nobody to do for. You always gone. Edwin. The way the servants--laugh. I ain't smart enough, like | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047898 | some women. I got to show it--that my heart's breaking." "Go to matines; go--" "Tell me how to make myself like Alma Zitelle to you, Harry. For God's sake, tell me!" He looked away from her, the red rising up above the rear of his collar. "You're going to drive me crazy desperate, too, some day, on that jealousy stuff. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000047899 | I'm trying to do the right thing by you and hold myself in, but--there's limits." "Harry, it--ain't jealousy. I could stand anything if I only knew. If you'd only come out with it. Not keep me sitting here night after night, when I know you--you're with her. It's the suspense, Harry, as much as anything is killing me. I could | 60 | gutenberg |
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