“...I dare say if you'd asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you - if he knew.''Why, don't you think he does know, Bromfield?''I'm not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he's attached to them. It doesn't at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn't know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town.”

“Why I love him is, I don't know, because he seems very brave and kind and sweet. All that stuff but something else, too. I don't know what something else, but he's different somehow, and what I'm trying to say is it's a good kind of difference, whatever it is.”

“Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do -- but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven't done so -- and now I'm old. It's too late. It has gone past me -- I've lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!”

“It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.”

“The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.”

“This is where he should say that he is in love with me, that I have changed his life and that he loves me for it. But he doesn't. Is it because he is shy? Or because he is too young to say such a thing? Or is it merely because he does not love me? The worst of it is, I am falling in love with him.”

“Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say that it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it.”