“I been running up a bill with the devil ever since, and now he's come to collect on the debt.”

“No good sentences ever include the word ‘should.’ I should have paid the tavern bill; now they’re coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend’s wife; now she devils me constantly. I should—”

“Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.”

“Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeve of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.”

“This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”

“Nay, it's not the Devil been leading her astray. It's books! That girl has been nothing but trouble ever since she learned how to read.”