Get away while you can; make progress while conditions are favorable. This turn of phrase, a twentieth-century Americanism, appears in several popular novels of the first half of the century, among them John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934), as well as in a letter of H. L. Mencken’s of 1916: “You would be a maniac not to go out for all that money while the going is good.”