The dark mother

The air moved toward the mountain: the waves and the trees and the earth moved toward the mountain. All the world moved gently upward toward the mountain like a Tide. The mounta...

They walked in silence. David found that walking so in silence beside this man he could think: his mind took form: he felt he could direct it. He said to himself: “I must think...

Mr. Deane answered the bell.... David stepped into a naked hall, hanging in camphored drapery. The varnished floor swept away in parabolic shadows; the bannisters of the stair w...

She took the glass. She bent down, her hair was a wonder over his eyes. A wonder, since her hair was hot and still it was good. He felt her moist lips on his chest.... There was...

In the conventional sense he understood nothing: in the sense in which life was a ruled open page for Muriel and her mother. But in the outlaw sense where these two were blind,...

Mr. Tibbetts was saying that it was a great joy to have a new young member of the family. He said this several times. He seemed to be talking down to David: to be choosing empha...

The lamps of the restaurant façade fell over Tom and bathed him. He had the sudden pain of feeling himself a black spot in warm blaze. He moved aside to shadow. He stepped out,...

She was quick to understand and to redispose her forces. “Then you must permit me to lend you five dollars. There now. I’ll be offended if you don’t.” She dug in her bag and hel...

“Who is to go?” Tom blazed at him. “Who is to go? I’ll tell you. Loafers who have nothing better to do. Men who are so miserable in their jobs they’d die for a chance to get awa...

Already a force worked in him, digesting this dense life, making it a function of his own, making its subtle fumes a stimulant for the force making it a function. Tom’s mind gro...

Tom’s advance in the social world was synchronous. The ladies who give teas are the sort who care for unattached young men. They are unhappily married, or at least unsatisfyingl...

All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying we...

“I feel you are unjust to yourself. Perhaps unjust to the world also. It can’t be as evil as you paint it. As for you, I know how far you are from what you say of yourself. You...

There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can chang...

“My dear fellow, I am getting busier all the time. You know that. If you don’t understand, who should? You know that there goes into a date like this something other than free c...

There seemed no affection at all: no fellowship. Even for themselves, these persons had no affection. Their egoism was a hard and desperate passion: fruit of some perennial resi...

She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of creamy silk that lashed about the rondu...

Suddenly, David was uncomfortable. He had felt strong entering the room. He had asked Tom if ever he was going to grow up because just then, perhaps more than at any other time,...

Swift shadows were his thoughts against the tower of his vision. David saw he was alive, and felt it good. Surely life was a miracle none could explain. Surely to approach the m...

You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thi...

Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One thing, one thing alone can spoil t...

“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe Raymond was on one side of David. On the o...

They walked up a residential avenue east of Central Park, where the cars swerved swift and remote between sedate, slow houses. They climbed a high brownstone stoop. They passed...

David was stark with the treachery of Tom. He could manage Tom. It was bitter hard, but he could manage Tom. These others--these living missiles of mud Tom used to fling at him,...

He was flippant over her tragedy: over her life. He was clear-eyed admitting it, and then he was flippant! He stood next to her with his light grace and she hated him. For he wa...

For the first time, she noticed the tilt of Miss Daindrie’s head on her lovely neck: the whimsical curve of the cheekbone and the clear, almost protrusive outline of the jaw. Th...

“Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt the hollowness of nervous strain, as...

Tom went on. He had been silent and distant. He had made, for a long time, no advances to David. He had left him alone. Now in the silence of David, he saw his old art upon him,...