“There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.”

“...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...”

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”

“Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.”

“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.”

“It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them. ”