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Have you any children of your own, Mr Savage? asked E R Bingham when they were settled in the taxicab.

No, I’m not married at the moment, said Dick shakily, and lit himself a cigarette.

Will you forgive a man old enough to be your father for pointing something out to you? E R Bingham took Dick’s cigarette between two long knobbed fingers and dropped it out of the window of the cab...

You’ve made me feel like a man again,Mary,he’d tell her a dozen times a day.Now I’m beginning to feel like I could do something again.After all,the revolutionary labor movement’s just beginning in this country.The tide’s going to turn, you watch.It’s begun with Lenin and Trotzky’s victories in Russia. There was something moving to Mary in the way he pronounced those three words: Lenin, Trotzky, Russia.

Tell us, doctors of philosophy, what are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be not jailed not afraid not-hungry not cold not without love, not a worker for a power he has never seen that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a man or a woman or a child.

..like Aladdin with his magic lamp, the Capitalist, the Investor, and the Builder converted what was once a desolate swamp into a wonderful city linked with a network of glistening boulevards
..like a magnificent shawl of sapphire and jade, studded with a myriad of multicolored gems, the colorful waters of the lower Atlantic weave a spell of lasting enchantment.

In May the show went on the road. For a long time she couldn’t decide whether to go or not. Queenie Riggs said absolutely not. It was all right for her, who didn’t have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travelingman in a onehorse town and marry him before he sobered up, but for Margo Dowling, who had a career ahead of her, nothing doing. Better be at liberty all summer than a chorine on the road.

Hey, Taki, bring me that bottle of Scotch..Say, tell me, Taki, Charley went on, pouring himself a stiff drink, ‘in your country..is it so damn difficult for a guy to get married?
The Jap smiled and made a little bow. ‘In my country everything much more difficult.’
Next day when Charley got back from the plant he found a wire from Doris saying Saturday absolutely impossible. ‘Damn the bitch’, he said aloud.

We’re just laborfakers, she yelled in his face, and ran into the bedroom.
He stood over her still chewing on the cheese and crackers as he nervously patted the back of her shoulder. ‘What a spiteful thing to say...My child, you mustn’t be so hysterical...This isn’t the first strike that’s ever come out badly...Even this time there’s a gain...

‘Well, young lady, you’ve written a firstrate propaganda piece for the Nation or some other parlorpink sheet in New York, but what the devil do you think we can do with it? This is Pittsburg.
Goodbye, Miss French, I wish I had some way of using you because you’re a mighty smart girl…and smart girl reporters are rare…I’ve sent your slip to the cashier…’

He made a gesture with his elbow as they turned a corner past a group of ragged kids making mudpies: they were pale flabby filthy little kids with pouches under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes away, but she'd seen them, as she'd seen the photograph of the dead woman with her head caved in.
'Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity' Gus Moscowski said way down in his throat.

Say, Joe, is that bird a financial wizard or is he a nut? He talks like greenbacks grew on trees.

He makes ‘em grow there. Honestly that bird is going to be the Durant of aviation financing.

He don’t seem to know a Liberty motor from the hind end of a blimp.

He knows the Secretary of the Interior, which is a hell of a lot more important.

Dorris, lemme say what I want to say for a minute, he blurted out suddenly. I don’t know whether you like anybody else very much. I kinder don’t think you do from what you said about the guys you know.

Oh, please don’t propose, she said. If you knew how I hated proposals, particularly in a cab caught in a traffic jam.

No, I don’t mean that. You wouldn’t want to marry me the way I am now anyway...

That evening at five, when he met Anne Elizabeth at Ed’s apartment, he had to tell her all about the official receptions. He said all he’d seen had been a gold replica of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus up at the Capitol when the President had been made a Roman citizen, and his face in the Forum.
‘A terrifying face, I swear it’s a reptile’s face, not warmblooded, or else the face on one of those old ..

He smiled and poured her out some more wine and said with a sigh:
‘You’re the most damnably attractive woman I ever met, Eveline...but like all women what you worship is power, when money’s the main thing it’s money, when it’s fame it’s fame, when it’s art, you’re a goddamned artlover...I guess I’m the same, only I kid myself more.’

So you think I’m yellow,do you?Well,you may be right Anne..not that I give a damn..I mean,you see,there’s times when a fellow ought to be a coward & times when he ought to do the he-man stuff.Now don’t talk for a minute,let me say something..I’m hellishly attracted to you..& it’s been yellow of me not to tell you about it before,see? I don’t believe in love or anything like that, all bourgeois nonsense;

That night, wearing her first evening dress at the dance,she came to in the feeling of tulle and powder and crowds, boys all stiff and scared in their dark coats,girls packing into the dressing room to look at each other’s dresses. She never said a word while she was dancing,just smiled and held her head a little to one side and hoped somebody would cut in. Half the time she didn’t know who she was dancing with..

‘How lovely you look, you must excuse ma sayin’ so.’ Something hotter than the June sunshine had come out of Joe’s very dark eyes and run in a blush over her face and down the back of her neck under her thin dress and down the middle of her bosom, where the little breasts that she tried never to think of were just beginning to be noticeable.
...she got so excited she never remembered anything that happened.

When Mr Wilson addressed the Trenton convention that nominated him for Governor he confessed his belief in the common man (the smalltown bosses and the wardheelers looked at each other and scratched their heads); he went on, his voice growing firmer:

‘that is, the man by whose judgment I for one wish to be guided, so that as the tasks multiply, and as the days come when all will feel confusion and dismay, ...

The Wilsons lived in a universe of words linked into an incontrovertible firmament by two centuries of Calvinist divines,
God was the Word
and the Word was God.
Doctor Wilson was a man of standing who loved his home and his children and good books and his wife and correct syntax and talked to God every day at family prayers;
he brought his sons up
between the Bible and the dictionary.

The soldiers and sailors gave the only touch of color to the celebration. They went in wholeheartedly for having a good time, getting plenty of drink despite the fact that they were in uniform. Some of these returned fighters nearly caused a riot when they took an armful of stones and attempted to break an electric sign at Broadway and 42 Street reading: WELCOME HOME TO OUR HEROES

‘Young man, your opinions, while showing a senseless and cowardly turn of mind, don’t matter. The American people is out to get the Kaiser. We are bending every nerve and every energy towards that end; nobody who gets in the way of the great machine the energy and devotion of a hundred million patriots is building towards the stainless purpose of saving civilization from the Huns will be mashed like a fly. ..

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little backhouse, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a clean scrubbed seat and a halfmoon in the door, through which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling hummed busily in and out. He’d sit there with his belly aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy and at home while..

‘Dirk...this doesn’t sound very ladylike, but like this it’s too tiresome...The way you acted last spring I thought you liked me...well, how much do you? I want to know.’
Dirk put his glass down and turned red. Then he took a deep breath and said, ‘Eveline, you know I’m not the marrying kind...love ‘em and leave ‘em’s more like it. I can’t help how I am.’

..but everything was different. Hilda was changed too. Dick was worried to see that she and Edwin held hands during supper. When they got alone she told him that she and Edwin were very happy now and that she was going to have a baby and that bygones must be bygones. Dick stalked up and down and ran his hands through his hair and talked darkly about death and hellonearth and going to the devil as fast as he could..

A man has to do many things in his life.
Reed was a Westerner and words meant what they said.
He threw everything he had and himself into Smolny, dictatorship of the proletariat;
U.S.S.R.
The first workers republic was established and stands.
Reed wrote, undertook missions (there were spies everywhere), worked till he dropped, caught typhus and died in Moscow.

They had a good time together. They sat on the edge of the bed talking. She looked flushed and pretty in a fragile sort of way in her pink shimmy shirt. She showed him a snapshot of her steady who was second engineer on a tanker. ‘Ain’t he handsome? I don’t hustle when he’s in town. He’s that strong…He can crack a pecan with his biceps.’ She showed him the place on his arm where her steady could crack a pecan.

One raw March evening he took Emiscah to see The Birth of a Nation. The battles and the music and the bugles made them all jelly inside. They both had tears in their eyes when the two boys met on the battlefield and died in each other’s arms on the battlefield. When the Ku Klux Klan charged across the screen Charley had his leg against Emiscah’s leg and she dug her fingers into his knee so hard it hurt....

It was scary being out of a job; she dreaded having to go back to live at her mother’s; she even put her name down at an employment agency. The woman at the desk was a stout woman with a bad teeth and a mean smile, and showed her the waiting list of expert stenographers she had and said that girls ought to marry and that trying to earn their own living was stuff and nonsense because it couldn’t be done.

Dearest Gertrude:
In this terrible moment of grief, allow me to remind you that I think of you constantly. Let me know at once if I can be of any use to you in any way. In the valley of the shadow of death we must realize that the Great Giver to whom we owe all love and wealth and all affection around the jocund fireside is also the Grim Reaper...
Your Devoted Ward

She had a way of going limp suddenly in his arms under his kisses that made him sure that she loved him.But when he got home after those evenings,he’d be too nervous & excited to sleep,& would pace up and down the room wanting a woman to sleep with,& cursing himself out.Often he’d take a cold bath and tell himself he must attend to business & not worry about those things or let a girl get under his skin that way

One day Oliver Taylor came into the office with a funny smile on his face and said, ‘Ward, Gertrude’s got a crush on you. She can’t talk about anything else...Go ahead; I don’t give a damn. She’s too goddam much trouble for me to handle. She tires me out in a half an hour.
It’s probably just because she doesn’t know me, said Ward blushing a little.