The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of theoretical abyss.

From Smith’s back door Liz could see ore barges way out in the lake going toward Boyne City.

It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.

“What’ve I got to go back there to go to school for when everything’s on the bum there?” I’d ask him.

I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back.

From Smith’s back door you could look out across the woods that ran down to the lake and across the bay.

“If you think the logs are stolen, leave them alone and take your tools back to the camp,” the doctor said.

In back was the garage, the chicken coop and the second-growth timber like a hedge against the woods behind.

Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills.

“Aren’t you going back to work, dear?” asked the doctor’s wife from the room where she was lying with the blinds drawn.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face.

In back of them was the close second-growth timber of the point and in front was the bay with the mouth of Hortons Creek.

He carefully picked up all the apricots off the floor, some of them had gone under the stove, and put them back in the pan.

He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps.

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside.

It was made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight.

Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge, his feet firm, the muleta curving and at each swing the crowd roaring.

The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods.

I looked back as we came out and there was only the sea, and below in the bay, a line of beach with fishing-boats and above, on the side of the hill, a town and then capes far down the coast.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again⁠—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright.

Gosh, I was so excited, I was afraid to look at them, but I fixed the glasses on the place where they would come out back of the trees and then out they came with the old black jacket going third and they all sailing over the jump like birds.

He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line.

I was rather literary in college⁠—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News⁠—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

Then a couple of guys came in and one of them patted me on the back and then went over and looked at my old man and then pulled a sheet off the cot and spread it over him; and the other was telephoning in French for them to send the ambulance to take him out to Maisons.

If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve behind.

When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight with the rope around his neck, the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair holding up a little crucifix.

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more practical ideas⁠ ⁠… and now he sat here and contemplated the immortal Gloria for whom young Stuart Holcome had gone from New York to Pasadena⁠—watched her, and knew that presently she would cease dancing and come back to sit on his left hand.

And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration⁠—Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

George was coming down in telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.