He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold… - Theodore Dreiser

Life's little ironies are not always manifest. We hear distant rumbling sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the reality.
(from W.L.S.)

A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject - the proper penitent, groveling at a woman's slipper.

was locked up here and they would not let him go. There was a system — a horrible routine system — as long since he had come to feel it to be so. It was iron. It moved automatically like a machine without the aid or the hearts of men. These guards! They with their letters, their inquiries, their pleasant and yet really hollow words, their trips to do little favors, or to take the men in and out of the yard or to their baths — they were iron, too — mere machines, automatons, pushing and pushing and yet restraining and restraining one — within these walls, as ready to kill as to favor in case of opposition — but pushing, pushing, pushing — always toward that little door over there, from which there was no escape — no escape — just on and on — until at last they would push him through it never to return! Never to return!