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There moved before my sight three women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and very young, not of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious body and warm abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the other and last, daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent and compelling.

Thou hast found that the price was given in vain; that the hollow and deceitful enjoyments of opulence and dignity were not worth the purchase; and that, frivolous and unsubstantial as they are, the only path that leads to them is that of honesty and diligence.

Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal obligation to meet the material demands of death.

Amid the fury of such a tempest, a thousand memories, each bearing in its breast the corpse of some dead deed whose influence haunts us yet, are driven like feathers before the blast, as unsubstantial and as unregarded. The mists which shroud our self knowledge become transparent, and we are smitten with sudden lightning-like comprehension of our own misused power over our fate.

These were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing.

His anchors had been his love, his work, and his religion, and none of them held. The factory, to which he had given the best of his brain and his body, for which he had dreamed and aspired and planned, was a nightmare to him. Mrs. Purdy and the church activities, which had loomed so large in his life, were but fleeting, unsubstantial shadows.

The ancient Teuton could not have endured a heaven with mere airy, unsubstantial joys. There must be celestial roasts of strong meat for him, and flagons of his ancestral ale. His descendants to this day never celebrate a great occasion without a huge feed and corporation dinners, thus establishing their legitimate descent from Teutonic stock.

But when one sees the same thread woven into men who are leaders, men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and powerful men; when one sees how unfair they can be, how unteachable, the great blind areas in their eyes also, their want of generosity, then one's doubts gather like mists across this Utopian valley, its vistas pale, its people become unsubstantial phantoms, all its order and its happiness dim and recede....

In vain did my imagination flatter me with schemes of future happiness: surly reason always interposed, and in a moment overthrew the unsubstantial fabric, by chastising the extravagance of my hope, and representing my unhappy situation in the right point of view.

You couldn't make it true if you sat up all night to do it." "When I go into the business details of the matter tomorrow morning you will realize the truth of it," said Mr. Palford. "Seventy thousand pounds a year and Temple Barholm are not unsubstantial facts." "Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, my lad that's what it stands for!" put in Mr. Hutchinson.