And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot. - Edmund Clerihew Bentley

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.

Trent read and re-read the pitiful message [a suicide note], so full of the awful egotism of grief.

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?
When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered under a blow.