“...Mabel put on the boiled potatos, unmashed, the stewed tomatos, some inferior dried beef, and some bread that plainly said, 'Darling, I am growing old'.”

“..Like the cavities of missing teeth in some giant denture, into which new ones were to be fitted.”

“I've tried to keep pleasant," Mabel went on. "You don't know how I've tried. I have that verse pinned up on my dresser, aboutThe man worth while is the man who can smile,When everything goes dead wrong.""Take it down," Mother said cheerfully. "If there's a verse in the world that has been worked overtime, it's that one. I can't think of anything more inane than to smile when everything goes dead wrong, unless it is to cry when everything is passably right. That verse always seemed to me to be a surface sort of affair. Take it down and substitute 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.' That goes to the heart of things--when you feel that strength, then the dead-wrong things begin to miraculously right themselves.”

“He [Sam] wrote it with great flourishes, his hand making many dizzy elliptical journeys before it settled down to make a elaborate 'E' with a curving tail as long as some prehistoric baboons.”

“I . . . you mean me?""Quite naturally, when I said, 'What about you, yourself,' I meantyou.”

“Betty, who had found an old battered doll, was sitting quietly in the corner and industriously endeavoring to pick its one eye out”

“...Let me tell you something, Allen. I've been around now, enough to know there are some bigger things in the world than marriage and a prosaic settling down under one roof.""Now, I'll tell you something." He sat up straighter under the wheel. "There isn't,—not a thing—when it's two people who really care, and, and settling down under one roof, as you say, is the beginning of a real home. There's nothing finer...”