"Nice girl, Alma."

"It snowed so the day of--my husband's funeral. Why, do you know that up
to then I never had an attack of neuralgia in my life. Didn't even know
what a headache was. That long drive. That windy hilltop with two men to
keep me from jumping into the grave after him. Ask Alma. That's how I
care when I care. But, of course, as the saying is, 'time heals.' But
that's how I got my first attack. 'Intenseness' is what the doctors
called it. I'm terribly intense."

"I--guess when a woman like you--cares like--you--cared, it's not much
use hoping you would ever--care again. That's about the way of it, isn't
it?"

If he had known it, there was something about his intensity of
expression to inspire mirth. His eyebrows lifted to little Gothic arches
of anxiety, a rash of tiny perspiration broke out over his blue shaved
face, and as he sat on the edge of his chair it seemed that inevitably
the tight sausagelike knees must push their way through mere fabric.

Ordinarily he presented the slightly bay-windowed, bay-rummed, spatted,
and somewhat jowled well-being of the Wall Street bachelor who is a
musical-comedy first-nighter, can dig the meat out of the lobster claw
whole, takes his beefsteak rare and with two or three condiments, and
wears his elk's tooth dangling from his waistcoat pocket and mounted on
a band of platinum and tiny diamonds.

Mothers of debutantes were by no means unamiably disposed toward him,
but the debutantes themselves slithered away like slim-flanked minnows.