All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why⁠—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds.

They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house.

When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them.

When she looked at them they didn’t seem to be moving at all but if she went in and dried some more dishes and then came out again they would be out of sight beyond the point.

He drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one.

They are not perfect ovals⁠—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end⁠—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.

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.

Most of the confidences were unsought⁠—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.