A Woman's War: A Novel

No one in Roxton would have imagined that any shadow of dread darkened the windows of the house in Lombard Street. Even to his most intimate friends, James Murchison would have...

Catherine’s lips were tightly set as she turned from the shadows of St. Antonia’s elms, where the sunlight made a moving fret of gold upon the grass. The sky was a broad canopy...

The month was August, and August at its worst, a month of glare and dust, and an atmosphere more trying to the temper than all the insolent bluster of a bragging March.

Roxton, like a certain lady of literary fame, was ever ready with its free opinions on any subject that it did not understand. The return of the Murchisons had exercised the tow...

A hundred rows of mud-colored brick “boxes,” set face to face and back to back. Scores of cobbled streets, a gray band of stone, and two gray bands of slate. Interminable brown...

A white-capped servant came running across Lombard Street from Mr. Carmagee’s, and hailed Murchison’s chauffeur, who had just swung the car to the edge of the footway outside th...

There were many men in Wilton who had looked at their children’s graves, little banks of green turf ranged on the hill-side where the winds wailed in winter like the mythical sp...

James Murchison’s motor-car drew up before a row of buildings in Mill Lane, a series of brick boxes that were flattered with the name of “Prospect Cottages.” So far as prospect...

A barrow-load of belated luggage went clattering by as the shrill pipe of the guard’s whistle sounded the departure. On the opposite platform a couple of porters were banging em...

It is the privilege of short-tempered women to wax testy under the touch of trouble, and Mrs. Baxter, her hard face querulous and unlovely, stood in the doorway of Boland’s Farm...

A March wind blew the dust and dead leaves in eddies through the breadth of Castle Gate as Dr. Steel’s brougham drew up before the timbered front of a Jacobean house. The mellow...

Mrs. Betty Steel sat alone at the breakfast-table with a silver teapot covered with a crimson cosy before her, and a pile of letters and newspapers at her elbow. The west front...

Failure is bitter enough in itself to a man of energy and strength of purpose, but more bitter still are the humiliations and the sufferings that failure may impose on those he...

Parker Steel’s wife, in a depressed and melancholy mood, wandered restlessly about the house in St. Antonia’s Square, with the chimes of St. Antonia’s thundering out every “quar...

Murchison slept the sleep of the just that night, to wake to the golden stillness of a July day. With the return of consciousness came a feeling of profound relief as he remembe...

It is said that a pretty woman is never out of patience when she has a glass to gaze at, and Betty Steel, casting critical yet complacent glances into the depths of a Venetian m...

June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the...

On two successive days the society of loafers that lounged outside the gates of Roxton station for the ostensible purpose of carrying hand-bags and parcels, had noticed Major Mu...

James Murchison, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the c...

It was a wet evening in June, and a steady downrush of rain purred on the tiled roofs of the old town and set the broad eaves and high-peaked gables dripping. A summer sweetness...

Though the most agile of mock cats cut capers behind the foot-lights, and though forty fairies in green and crimson fluttered their gauzy wings under the paste-board trees, Gwen...

The surest test of a man’s efficiency is to leave him in a responsible post with nothing to trust to save his own skill and courage. Young doctors, like raw soldiers, are prone...

Dr. Little descended the stairs of Major Murray’s house with the alert and rather furtive look of a man who has been for days subjected to the semi-sceptical questions of intere...

An increased sallowness and a slight thinning of the hair were the only changes that might have been noticed in Parker Steel that spring. The characteristic symptoms had been sl...

Murchison sat for a while before the open window after his wife had gone to bed. He could hear her moving to and fro in the room above him, the only sound in the silence of the...

Porteus Carmagee, the lawyer, and his sister lived in Lombard Street, in a grim, blind-eyed, stuccoed house with laurels in tubs before it, and chains and posts defending an ari...

By certain scientific thinkers life is held to be but a relative term, and the “definitions” of the ancients have been cast aside into the very dust that they despised as gross...

A doctor’s life is not lightly to be envied. Like a traveller in a half-barbarous country, he must be prepared for all emergencies, trusting to his own mother-wit and the resour...

There is little that is beautiful in death, save, perhaps, in the faces of children, and those taken in the heyday of their youth. As in life the majority of mortals are ugly an...

The glitter of the sea visible between the foliage of flowering-shrubs seemed to add a touch of vivacity to the June somnolence that hung like a summer mist over the south-coast...

Roxton, that little red town under a June sky, looked like a ruby strung upon the silver thread of a river and set in a green hollow of the hills. As yet the enterprising builde...

“I have laid the facts of the case,” wrote the demi-god from Mayfair, “before the General Medical Council. I consider this action of mine to partake of the nature of a public du...

The windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden at the back of the house, where Lent lilies were already swinging their golden heads over borders of crocu...

There was a dance that night at one of the Roxton houses, and Mrs. Betty, brilliant in cream and carnation, swept through the room with all the verve of a girl of twenty. Her pa...

Parker Steel was compiling his list of visits for the day, when, following the sharp “burr” of the electric bell, came the announcement that Mrs. Murchison, of Lombard Street, w...

Betty Steel sat alone at the open window of her room one evening as the sun went down over the red roofs of the old town. Lying back in her chair, with her head on a cushion of...

Mr. Gehogan, the gentleman from Ireland who had attempted to possess himself of the scatterings of James Murchison’s practice, had discovered no proper spirit of appreciation in...

Miss Carmagee sat crying at the breakfast-table over a letter that she held in her fat, white hand. It was a letter from Catherine, and told of the last resting-place of Gwen, a...

Dr. John Tugler, standing before the nursery window, bit one corner of his mustache, and stared hard at the chimney of the steam-mill trailing a plume of smoke across the dull g...

In the spring of the year the blood is hot, and the quicksilver of youth burns in the brain. The poise of true manhood is not reached at twenty, the experience to know, the stre...

There was a ripple of chimes through the frosty air as Catherine Murchison turned from King’s Walk into Lombard Street, and saw the moon shining white and clear between the blac...