MihaElla ’s Reviews > Flappers and Philosophers > Status Update

If you run your hand along Samuel’s jaw you'd feel a lump.He admits he's never been sure which fist left it there,but he wouldn't lose it for anything.He says there's no cad like an old cad,& that sometimes just before making a decision,it's a great help to stroke his chin.They call it a nervous characteristic,but it's not that.It's so he can feel again the gorgeous clarity, the lightning sanity of those four fists

“Samuel didn't sleep much that night. He knew that for the first time in his business career he had made a dismal, miserable failure. But some instinct in him, stronger than will, deeper than training, had forced him to do what would probably end his ambitions and his happiness. But it was done and it never occurred to him that he could have acted otherwise.”

His mind was that exquisite tabula rasa that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank.

His diversion was—women. There were half a dozen: two or three débutantes, an actress (in a minor way), a grass-widow, and one sentimental little brunette who was married

At present no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith;possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist,but,I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished.But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face,as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl's lips

Dalyrimple,you've got brains & you've got the stuff in you—& that's what I want.I'm going to put you into the State Senate

The what?

The State Senate.We want a young man who has got brains,but is solid & not a loafer.& when I say State Senate I don't stop there.We're up against it here.We've got to get some young men into politics-you know the old blood that's been running on the party ticket year in & year out

Other men who broke the laws of justice and charity lied to all the world. He at any rate would not lie to himself. He was more than Byronic now: not the spiritual rebel, Don Juan; not the philosophical rebel, Faust; but a new psychological rebel of his own century—defying the sentimental a priori forms of his own mind——

Cutting corners—the words began to fall apart,forming curious phrasings—little illuminated pieces of themselves,each of which had a strangely familiar ring.

Cutting corners meant rejecting the old childhood principles that success came from faithfulness to duty,that evil was necessarily punished or virtue necessarily rewarded—that honest poverty was happier than corrupt riches

It meant being hard

I don't want to shock you,Kieth,but I can't tell you how—how inconvenient being a Catholic is.It really doesn't seem to apply any more.As far as morals go, some of the wildest boys I know are Catholics.& the brightest boys—I mean the ones who think and read a lot, don't seem to believe in much of anything any more

Tell me about it.The bus won't be here for another half-hour

They sat down on a bench by the path

I'm all right, she repeated.

But though a warm peace was falling her mind and heart she felt oddly broken and chastened, as if some one had held her stripped soul up and laughed.

“But people want human sympathy," objected Lois. "They want to feel the other person's been tempted."

"Lois, in their hearts they want to feel that the other person's been weak. That's what they mean by human.”