A Girton Girl

‘The foundations of Newnham and of Girton may be deep,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, in his pleasant, level, semi-American voice. ‘The foundations of the Gogmagog Hills are deeper...

Ere Geoffrey had had time to retaliate, a factor of no common importance was destined to enter the difficult problem of Dinah Arbuthnot’s happiness. Holding the corner of her ap...

‘The battle is to the strong, Marjorie Bartrand; the race to the swift. Women have been fatally handicapped since the world began. And Nature understands her own intentions, dep...

As a four-foot high boy, with shrewd observant Scottish eyes, with a Scottish mind already beginning to hold its own ideas as to the universe, he was sent, through the reluctant...

The door was opened by a French serving-man, who bestowed on Geoffrey a bow such as valets used to copy from their masters in days when the first country in Europe possessed a m...

An atmosphere of fresh country air, blent with tobacco smoke, surrounded him, as we like to think it surrounded Parson Adams. He saluted Geff with that nice mixture of personal...

Meanwhile the solstice night grew at each instant more purple, more mysterious. Geff felt himself in love with midsummer starlight, with Guernsey, with Tintajeux. Marjorie he wo...

Dinah was still busied over her embroidery frame when Geoffrey’s entrance brought the coolness of the night, the wholesome odour of heliotropes and roses, into the chronically d...

‘Sixties’ and ‘forties’ are traditions, happily, of the past. Although Sarnian spinsters may still go out to tea with a maid and a hand-lanthorn, the number of their candles is...

But the thunder-shower soon broke, the blue sky showed beyond. Tears, Marjorie Bartrand shed none. What sorrows had she of her own, what sweetheart, philandering or otherwise, t...

‘My sympathy, I believe, was rightly bestowed,’ said Marjorie frigidly. ‘I would not see the poorest wandering pedlar start for the Gros Nez cliffs without helping him to the ex...

By three o’clock the road between Petersport and the Arsenal plateau was filled with a growing stream of men and women. Simple rose lovers many of them, but some lovers of anoth...

The refreshment tent was pitched at the most conspicuous point of the Arsenal, just within the gates. Here Linda Thorne, assisted by three or four white-muslined aides-de-camp,...

But admiration to Dinah was no new thing. As a girl she never went through that chrysalis or ugly-duckling stage, the remembrance of which to many women puts an edge on after tr...

For there outside the tent stood Dinah Arbuthnot, fair and flushed. She and Lord Rex were eating ices, as Gaston, the materialist, predicted. The western light shone on Dinah’s...

Weaker men pay allegiance readily enough to the passion under whose sway they happen to rest. Geff was loyal, with a fine, a rare fidelity to the love that had passed away. He w...

Rex Basire showed no disposition to let his newly-made acquaintance with Dinah Arbuthnot cool. Long before the hour for visitors on Monday afternoon, Louise, the French waitress...

Rex Basire, meanwhile, counted manfully on. A hundred-and-ten from the corner scroll to the first line of blue; and seventy-six, either way, of grounding. Emboldened by success,...

The first dressing-bell was ringing by the time he reached the hotel. Dinah’s parlour was empty; her embroidery frame--silver paper shrouding its impossible forget-me-nots and a...

The speech was really the best chosen, prettiest thing that a somewhat errant husband could have found to say. In every moral encounter that befel Gaston Arbuthnot, and whether...

In a character like Marjorie’s, softened and remorseful moods are apt, however, to be intermittent. On the evening of Saturday her pride had melted, ay, to such a point that, ho...

Wednesday morning’s sun rose cloudless. A few persistent fog wreaths lay, even as the day advanced, to leeward of the islands. There was an undue ground-swell, although the surf...

It was the hottest, most deserted hour of the day when the walking party reached Langrune plage, an hour when such of the young Parisians as do not follow _la pêche_ drive donke...

A rough-paved village square; green-shuttered houses, sweltering in the afternoon sun; a pair of openwork spires, delicate as lace, dazzlingly white as Caen stone could make the...

‘You have found out a right pleasant spot.’ Geff settled himself coolly into repose among the long wayside grasses that clothed the opposite or field side of the ditch. ‘Our fri...

Never was a man surer of tumbling into little unlooked-for sociabilities than Gaston Arbuthnot. Had he been shipwrecked on a South Sea island I believe Gaston would have chanced...

‘In two words, you have amused yourself, my dear.’ Under cover of the friendly twilight, Gaston Arbuthnot pressed his wife’s hand as it rested, a little shyly, on his arm. ‘A go...

Meantime, whilst this mature pair of sentimentalists recalled the past under the starlight, the younger people, sound of heart and limb, were making the most of the present insi...

All this time the _Princess_, lying well outside the Luc rocks, was getting up her steam. Before the waltz had ended a red light, hung from the vessel’s bows, gave the signal fo...

If Cassandra Tighe’s taste for piquant situation once in a hundred times led her astray, the ninety-nine good offices performed by the kindly old maid in the interval were suffi...

The outlook continued promising overhead. The tide was at the right ebb for making Barfleur Point. At an earlier hour than had been hoped for, the friendly Casket lights showed,...

Dinah did not turn from him. Nay, although her brain was in a whirl, although her voice was not under command, although her heart was bursting, Dinah’s lips smiled. She was mono...

The short June night drew to its close, and still the weather continued fair. The sky was full of stars, a solitary lambent planet quivered in the east. By the time the moon had...

Dinah Arbuthnot thought over the few quarrels, the many misunderstandings of her married life, grown little, all, before the hour’s largeness. She thought how, in five or six mi...

But their speech betrayed them not. Roseate stage of the passion when unacknowledged lovers are conscious each of the other’s secret, yet talk upon commonplace subjects, look ce...

The syringa bloom had fallen during the past week. No odour, save the delicate, intangible freshness of sea and moor, met the sense. There was not a wrinkle on the far Atlantic,...

The kiss cost him dear. A fledgling girl is not, finally, to be captured without a struggle, save by a master hand; and Geoffrey’s was the hand of a prentice.

It was the first occasion since their marriage that she had in like manner failed. After ever so short a separation it was Dinah’s habit to go bravely to the fore on harbour sid...

The project roused her, at least, into physical brightness. As she walked at Geoffrey’s side towards the hospital, the basket of strawberries hanging from her arm, her hands fil...

And all this time an offer of truce lay on the mantelshelf of Dinah’s parlour; an offer directed to himself in the handwriting whose Greek e’s, whose girlish assumption of schol...

Madame Thorne had called--there was scarce five minutes since. The visitor insisted ... but insisted on entering. A thousand amiabilities were to be transmitted by the tongue of...

‘Made sure Arbuthnot would be here--that is to say, _our_ Arbuthnot’--Lord Rex stammered; he showed embarrassment that sat on him oddly, as he apologised for his uninvited prese...

It was a custom, dating farther back than Andros Bartrand’s childhood, that the Seigneurs of Tintajeux should hold a stiff and formal levée on the first Saturday of every altern...

‘To a naturally industrious man these islands would be the mischief.’ The characteristic remark came from Gaston, who was entering his wife’s sitting-room just about the hour wh...

‘No argument can help us, Geff. A woman without a tithe of my poor wife’s noble qualities but possessing even a faint sense of the ridiculous, might be reached: Dinah, never! Oh...

Within a week of Geoffrey’s departure Dinah and her husband, bride and bridegroom once more, started joyously on their way to Italy. There was a little wonder among the few peop...

‘I just feel we are too happy. It makes me tremble, Gaston. I would rather see the speck of cloud no bigger than a man’s hand than for ever live in dread of it.’

Madame Pouchée’s house, the goal of the girl’s journey, belonged to history; a thatched, lozenge-windowed structure, of which the pargeted gables, the black oak joints, and plas...

These things sank heavily on Marjorie’s bruised heart. She felt that Geoffrey’s indifference to herself was now an ascertained fact,--nay, that his fancy for her, at no time wor...