Swellness

"Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on."

From "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

"It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned onto the Gran Via.

'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, we could have had such a damned good time together.'

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car suddenly pressing Brett against me.

'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

This is the ending of The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. The characters have essentially done nothing and gone nowhere by the end of the novel, and the book essentially a describes people without meaningful lives dealing with the circumstances before them (primarily by drinking a lot and going to bullfights). So, in the end, all they have is the thought that they "could have had such a damned good time together." Brett makes this statement, but Jake knows that it is just a statement and nothing more than wishful thinking.

Of course, Hemingway eventually could not deal with the circumstances before him and ended up scratching the back of his head with a shotgun. English majors have such a bright future :-)