Mrs. Cissy Beale and her daughter Cecily sat together in the latter’s bedroom–a bewitching apartment, in which pale-gray paper and pale-gray draperies formed an effective background for the rosewood furniture and the French mirrors and tapestried screens. Between the two women was a bassinet and a baby. “You act,” said Cecily, “as if you were […]

Kingdon Knox was not conscious of any special meanness of spirit. He was a lawyer and a good one. He was fifty, and wore his years with an effect of youth. He exercised persistently and kept his boyish figure. He had keen, dark eyes, and silver in his hair. He was always well groomed and […]

I With the Merryman girls economy was a fine art. Money was spent by them to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was sacrificed to the gods of yesterday. Little Anne Merryman had shivered all her short life in the bleakness of this domestic ideal. “Why can’t I have butter on my bread?” […]

“If you loved a man, and knew that he loved you, and he wouldn’t ask you to marry him, what would you do?” The Admiral surveyed his grand-niece thoughtfully. “What do you expect to do, my dear?” Petronella stopped on the snowy top step and looked down at him. “Who said I had anything to […]

“My great-grandfather slept in it,” Van Alen told the caretaker, as she ushered him into the big stuffy bedroom. The old woman set her candlestick down on the quaint dresser. “He must have been a little man,” she said; “none of my sons could sleep in it. Their feet would hang over.” Van Alen eyed […]

I “No man,” said O-liver Lee, “should earn more than fifteen dollars a week. After that he gets–soft.” “Soft nothing!” O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him unique. The other men within […]

Billy and I came down from the North and opened a grocery store at Jefferson Corners. It is a little store and there aren’t many houses near it–just the railroad station and a big shed or two. Beyond the sheds a few cabins straggle along the road, and then begin the great plantations, which really […]

I A woman, who under sentence of death could plan immediately for a trip to the circus, might seem at first thought incredibly light-minded. You had, however, to know Anne Dunbar and the ten years of her married life to understand. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, and he had few illusions. He had […]

I I had not known Tom Randolph a week before I was aware that life was not real to him. All his world was a stage, with himself as chief player. He dramatized everything–actions, emotions, income. Thus he made poverty picturesque, love a thing of the stars, the day’s work a tragedy, or, if the […]

It was so cold that the world seemed as stiff and stark as a poet’s hell. A little moon was frozen against a pallid sky. The old dark houses with their towers and gables wore the rigid look of iron edifices. The saint over the church door at the corner had an icicle on his […]

I Perry Cunningham and I had been friends for years. I was older than he, and I had taught him in his senior year at college. After that we had traveled abroad, frugally, as befitted our means. The one quarrel I had with fate was that Perry was poor. Money would have given him the […]

From the moment that Jimmie Harding came into the office, he created an atmosphere. We were a tired lot. Most of us had been in the government service for years, and had been ground fine in the mills of departmental monotony. But Jimmie was young, and he wore his youth like a gay cockade. He […]

The mystery of Nancy Greer’s disappearance has never been explained. The man she was to have married has married another woman. For a long time he mourned Nancy. He has always held the theory that she was drowned while bathing, and the rest of Nancy’s world agrees with him. She had left the house one […]