As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then […]

Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her–she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged–and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the […]

She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the […]

“My daughter Irene,” said Mrs. Carstyle (she made it rhyme with tureen), “has had no social advantages; but if Mr. Carstyle had chosen–” she paused significantly and looked at the shabby sofa on the opposite side of the fire-place as though it had been Mr. Carstyle. Vibart was glad that it was not. Mrs. Carstyle […]

It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were talking over George Lillo’s portraits–a collection of them was being shown at Durand-Ruel’s–and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:– “Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!” There was a chorus of interrogations. “Oh, because–he makes people look so horrid; the […]

I A Newport drawing-room. Tapestries, flowers, bric-a-brac. Through the windows, a geranium-edged lawn, the cliffs and the sea. Isabel Warland sits reading. Lucius Warland enters in flannels and a yachting-cap. Isabel. Back already? Warland. The wind dropped–it turned into a drifting race. Langham took me off the yacht on his launch. What time is it? […]

IT was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain’s street. The “as usual” was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval–in days and other sequences–that lay between this […]

I Waythorne, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner. It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be sure—his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife […]

I From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression […]

Their railway carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion—a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpetbag—had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow. Lydia’s eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating back till it lost itself in the […]