A Woman Ventures: A Novel

For twenty-one years he had been an assistant secretary in the Department of State at Washington--a rather conspicuous position, with a salary of four thousand a year. Influenti...

THREE months later--August, September, and October, the months of Stoughton’s glory--gave Emily Bromfield a minute acquaintance with all that lay within her new horizon. She was...

WINTER’S swoop upon Stoughton that year was early and savage. In her desperate loneliness and boredom Emily began occasionally to indulge in the main distraction of Stoughton--c...

UNTIL Wayland saw Emily at church he had no intention to seize the opportunity which Mrs. Ainslie’s disinterested kindliness had made for him. Ever since he left the restraint o...

WAYLAND had the commercial instinct too strongly developed not to fear that he was paying an exorbitant price for a fancy which would probably be as passing as it was powerful....

IN the third night Emily had ten hours of the sleep of exhausted youth. She awoke in the mood of the brilliant July morning which was sending sunshine and song and the odour of...

WITHIN a month old Miss Bromfield was again with her sister at Stockbridge; the house in Stoughton was sold; there were twenty-two hundred dollars to Emily’s credit in the Stoug...

“Good morning,” he said, in a business tone. “You’ll forgive me. I’m in a rush to get away to Saratoga this evening--for the Republican convention. Let’s go to the City Editor a...

THE first night that Emily ventured home alone a man spoke to her before she had got twenty feet from the car tracks. She had thought that if this should happen she would faint....

WHEN Emily came into the sitting-room the next morning at ten she found that Theresa had ordered breakfast for both sent there, and was waiting. She was in a dressing-gown, her...

SHE was in the parlour when Holyoke returned. The loungers and her fellow-guests had been wandering through the room to inspect her--“the lady writer from New York.” She herself...

WHEN Emily looked again two of the strikers, one waving a white rag at the end of a pole, were advancing toward the limp bodies in the centre of the square. They made three trip...

MARLOWE was as responsible for Emily’s self-exaggeration as was Emily herself. He had been enveloping her in an atmosphere of adulation, through which she could see clearly and...

FRANK wished to see Theresa well provided for--he was most amiable and generous where serving a friend cost him nothing and agreeably filled a few of his many vacant hours. He c...

THEY made several journeys to Monsieur Germain that fall, as he did not close his inn and return to Philadelphia until the second week in December. He had the instinctive French...

ON the way across the Atlantic her painful thoughts faded; and, after the mid-ocean period when the worlds on either side of those infinite waters dwindle into unreality, she fo...

EMILY’S “adventure” lingered with increasing vagueness for a few days, then vanished under a sudden pressure of work. When she was once more at leisure Marlowe came, and she was...

MARLOWE had been held above his normal self, not by Emily, but by an exalting love for her. Except in occasional momentary moods of exuberant animalism, he had not been low and...

THE Waylands took a small house at Neuilly for the summer, and Emily spent a great deal of time there. She found Theresa less lively but also less jarring than in their boarding...

IN September Emily, convinced that she could not afford to stay away from her own country longer, got herself transferred to the New York staff and crossed with the Waylands. In...

EMILY spent a week in studying “the work” of the Redeemer parish--the activities of its large staff of “workers” of different grades, from ministers down through deacons, deacon...

A WEEK after Evelyn’s call, the hall boy brought Edgar Wayland’s card to Emily. She was alone in the apartment, Joan having gone to the theatre with “her professor.” She hesitat...

EMILY went directly to her room. “Tell Miss Gresham not to wait,” she said to the maid, “and please save only a very little for me.” She slept two hours and awoke free from the...

STANHOPE plodded dully through his routine--listening to reports, directing his assistants, arranging services in the church and chapels, dictating letters. A score of annoying...

MR. WAKEMAN, under whom she had been working comfortably, was now displaced by a Mr. Gammell, whom she had barely seen and of whom she had heard alarming tales. He had been made...

ONE half of that mystery had been betrayed by little Mary. The other half she might have known long before had she not held aloof from her fellow workers, except the few who did...

EMILY was lunching alone at the Astor House in the innermost of the upstairs dining-rooms. She had just ordered when a woman entered--obviously a woman of the stage, although sh...

IT was the talk of the Sunday office that Emily was being “frozen out.” The women said it was her own fault--her looks had at last failed to give her a “pull.” The men said it w...

HAD Emily and Stilson been idlers or of those workers who look upon work as a curse, they would have taken one of two courses. Either Stilson would have repudiated his obligatio...

BUT Stilson’s image of her was no longer clear and fine; and in certain lights, or, rather, shadows, it seemed to have a sinister unloveliness. He assured himself that he felt t...

THAT fall and winter Emily and Stilson met often in the walk winding through the Park from Seventy-second street to the Plaza. Usually it was on Wednesday morning--his “lazy day...

EMILY often rebelled. Her common sense was always catching her at demanding, with the irrational arrogance of human vanity, that the course of the universe be altered and adjust...

AFTER a long and baffling search up and down through western Europe he learned that Courtleigh had robbed her and deserted her, and that she was alone, under the name of Mrs. Br...