Angelica

Mrs. Kennedy got up from her knees, wrung out the filthy and dripping cloth in her hands, and looked back with a sigh over the stairs she had just cleaned.

In spite of an air of complete self-assurance, Angelica was very nervous the next morning. She lingered over her breakfast with a sort of languor well-known to her mother, for w...

Angelica was ready by nine o’clock the next morning, with a bag in which was packed every decent thing she owned. The people in the flat above had been astounded by the sound of...

For here she was now, in a soft little nest of a room, furnished in mahogany and dull blue, with every sort of convenience and luxury, with a gleaming white bathroom of its own,...

Angelica awoke early the next morning and dressed quickly, determined to be ready before Mrs. Russell could possibly send for her. She needn’t have hurried; she waited from half...

Angelica was very nervous about having dinner with Mr. Eddie. He was obviously fastidious and hard to please, and she hadn’t the vaguest idea what his standards might be. She di...

Sharp at ten o’clock the next morning Angelica knocked at Polly’s door. Her eyes were dancing, she was filled with an exhilarating sense of mischief, for she had been having bre...

Perhaps, if Polly had imagined that she was serving as a model, or even that she was being shrewdly observed by Angelica, she would not have done what she did. She would have ma...

Angelica was consumed, devoured, by curiosity. She felt obliged to know more of this family--of Vincent, above all. So the next morning she got up very early, went down into the...

It now became the aim of Angelica’s life to satisfy Eddie. She felt that his standard was the right one, however painfully high it might be, and that he was genuinely concerned...

Mrs. Russell was the first to bestir herself. Perhaps because she was conscious that her emotions were so feeble, she always strained to emphasize, to exaggerate them. She at on...

And here was Angelica, the very next afternoon, sitting once more in her mother’s underground kitchen, with the teapot handy beside her on the stove and a familiar blue and whit...

Angelica was surprised at getting a letter the next morning, for she never got letters. The writing was necessarily unfamiliar, as there was none that would not have been. She o...

Angelica saw no one that night; but when she passed by the library, the door was half open and she heard voices in there--an unusual thing for that unsociable family.

This one idea remained with her when she got up from her brief sleep--this determination to get away. Except for this, she was drained quite dry of all ideas, all feelings. She...

She stood on the front steps long after he was out of sight, lost in a painful reverie. The rain was still falling steadily and violently, without wind, from a pale gray sky. Sh...

Mrs. Kennedy was very tired that afternoon. She had just finished scrubbing a kitchen for a tenant, crawling laboriously across the greasy soft-wood boards with her brush and he...

Angelica turned her face to the wall. That was the very worst of it. She hadn’t really trusted Vincent at all. She had simply followed an instinct of which she understood nothin...

"I don’t like living ’way up there," she answered calmly. "I’ve got more friends down around here. And my married daughter’s coming to live with me, and she’d rather be down her...

Mrs. Kennedy sighed, without speaking or interrupting her work. She was standing at the ironing-board, finishing a big week’s washing. It was a night of intolerable and sultry h...

Through the front basement window Mrs. Kennedy saw Angelica returning, a shockingly disheveled figure in the sweltering midday heat. She hurried to the door, with the baby in he...

"It seems to be my fate," said Polly to herself, "to be always forgiving and benefiting those that despitefully use me. Imagine me taking this child--Vincent’s child--and not fe...

Mrs. Kennedy made no preparation for going to work that day. She suffered from a strange, an inexplicable malady. She didn’t want to go to bed. She sat upright in a rocking-chai...

She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Eddie’s reply. She insisted to herself that it would be, must be, favourable; but when the letter came, when at last she held it in her...

Angelica’s new business suited her exactly. It absorbed her mind, and it trained and shaped and educated her to an extraordinary degree. Her bravado vanished when she no longer...

There was one particular day--a sort of seventh wave in her steady tide of success--that Angelica always remembered. To begin with, when she reached Fine Feathers, there was wha...

So behold Angelica returning to Buena Vista in this quite new rôle, coming up from the station in a taxi, if you please. She was thinking all the way of her last visit, of that...

He stopped directly in front of her and looked into her face with the vicious, sneering laugh she had once so dreaded; but now it troubled her not at all. She regarded him as a...

Angelica was working in the back parlour the next afternoon with Sillon when Devery brought her in a letter. She smiled ironically and tucked it into her blouse, for she knew th...

The parlour now rejoiced in a new and pretty little "set," put in there only the week before in order to receive the visits of Eddie. On one of the chairs sat Mrs. Kennedy, dres...

The next morning, just at the usual hour, Angelica entered the back parlour, where Sillon and Devery were working side by side. They both looked up in a sort of stern surprise,...