"'Fore God, you-all oughten ter look like that!" The man threw up his head, and laughed,--laughed as the wild, reckless and lost Brian Kent had laughed that black night when, in the drifting boat, he had cursed the life he was leaving and had drunk his profane toast to the darkness into which he was being carried.
Raising the manuscript, which represented all that the past months of his re-created life had meant to him, and grasping it in both hands, he shook it contemptuously, as he said, with indescribable bitterness and the reckless surrendering of every hope: "'All them fine things that I have wrote down for everybody ter read.'" He mimicked her voice with a sneer, and laughed again.

Then: "It's all a lie, Judy, dear;--a damned lie.

Auntie Sue is a saint, and believes it.

She made me believe it for a little while,--her beautiful, impossible dream-philosophy of the river.

The river,--hell!--the river is as treacherous and cruel and false and tricky and crooked as life itself! And I am as warped and twisted in mind and soul as you are in body, Judy, dear.