y, without its vulgarity
So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do
So old a world and groping still
The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances
There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure
They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy
Tragical character of heat
Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge
Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness
Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence
Weariness of buying
Willingness to find poetry in things around them

*****

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began
to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending
in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis
in framing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititious
literary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I have
employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the
hero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable would
bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found
myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask
the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not
to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil
and Isabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding Journey,' they would not
respond with the effect of early middle age which I desired in them.
They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of
that romance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till
I tried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under
my hand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as
people in something more than their second youth.

The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largest
canvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though 'A Hazard of New Fortunes
was not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, it
was the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. I
had the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as
it advanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests,
individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized
and amplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though I