“Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.”

“Well' Francie decided, 'I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but'.”

“Well," Francie decided, "I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life-and nothing else but.”

“Then I've been drunk, too," admitted Francie."On beer?""No. Last spring, in McCarren's Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.”

“Laurie's going to have a mighty easy life all right.Annie Laurie McShane! She'll never have the hard times we had, will she?No. And she'll never have the fun we had, either."Gosh! We did have fun, didn't we, Neeley?"Yeah!Poor Laurie, said Francie pityingly.”

“Francie looked at her legs. They were long, slender, and exquisitely molded. She wore the sheerest of flawless silk stockings, and expensively made high-heeled pumps shod her beautifully arched feet. "Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss," concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. "I'll never make it, I guess." Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.”

“Francie went over to stand at the great window from which she could see the East River twenty stories below. It was the last time she'd see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day. What had granma Mary Rommely said? "To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”