all beauty were passing, and you were given these things to hold in your arms before the world slipped away, would you give them up? - Theodore Dreiser

He began to see as one sees a city with a wall about it. Men were posted at the gates. You could not get in. Those inside did not care to come out to see who you were. They were so merry inside there that all those outside were forgotten, and he was on the outside.

She would never understand his craving for ease and luxury, for beauty, for love — his particular kind of love that went with show, pleasure, wealth, position, his eager and immutable aspirations and desires. She could not understand these things. She would look on all of it as sin — evil, selfishness. And in connection with all the fatal steps involving Roberta and Sondra, as adultery — unchastity — murder, even. And she would and did expect him to be terribly sorry and wholly repentant, when, even now, and for all he had said to the Reverend McMillan and to her, he could not feel so — not wholly so — although great was his desire now to take refuge in God, but better yet, if it were only possible, in her own understanding and sympathetic heart. If it were only possible.

"Such extravagance!" Gerhardt complained to Jennie. "Such waste! No good can come of anything like that, It will mean want one of these days."