"Broken Music"

“SO she’s sent for you too, has she?” said the doctor. Of course he knew that Miss Prenderghast must have sent for Monsieur le Curé as she had sent for the doctor himself, for n...

AFTER lunch Jean went to Elizabeth. She was washing up the dishes, or she preferred to let Jean think she was; as a matter of fact, she had been having what is known in servants...

THE doctor gave Jean a thermometer as a parting present, and the Curé brought him a little medal of St. Francis; he gave it to Jean after mass on his last morning.

“MY dear fellow,” said Romain, wandering vaguely into the breakfast-room at about eleven the following morning. “I really am quite desolated, but I find I can’t take you to the...

JEAN tried hard to be interested in his daily work. The day after Henri left him he went to the Bank with the greatest punctuality, and had in consequence to walk up and down th...

JEAN bore his new resolutions very easily at first; they filled up his days and they gave him an incentive, and for a time he did not come into contact with any other point of v...

Up to that moment she had no very definite intentions about Jean. She thought if she wasn’t too busy she would really give him an “evening” to meet a few artists. She was good-n...

LIANE was not fond of preliminaries. She considered that life was short and that love was infinitely shorter, and she thought that the best plan with both was to live in the pre...

IT was the night of the presentation of Liane’s new play. Jean sat down on a box in one of the wings; he could see part of the sloping stage from where he sat, and far up above...

THE trouble with keeping a cat in the bag is that, however good it may be for the cat, it is seldom good for the bag, and the less accustomed the cat is to this method of confin...

MARGOT woke next morning to a premonition of disaster. She had foreseen that she might lose her job last night; but this morning she realized it, which is quite a different affa...

JEAN felt no delight at having given up Liane, nor more than a passing flicker of gratified self-esteem at giving up the Bank. He waited with hostile eagerness for the expostula...

IT was a cold, damp day in the middle of February. Paris had for the moment borrowed a fog from her neighbour across the Channel; and habituated as she is to sunlight and clear...

IT was some time before Jean called Margot into his room; and when he did there was something in his expression which made her forget her happy news. He looked unlike himself an...

IF Mahomet, on arriving at the foot of the mountain, had met with a frank repulse from the object of his condescension--say, an earthquake or a stream of molten lava--it would h...

LIANE did not use empty threats. She was, as she was fond of proclaiming, a good-natured woman, and she never went out of her way to do anyone harm unless she meant to. Margot a...

JEAN opened dreamy eyes to look at Margot, who sat by his bedside reducing with swift competent hands a pile of his clothes that she was mending. His body felt blissfully light...

JEAN had told Margot that the one thing he would never forgive was interference in his concerns. No friend, he had explained, had the right to force upon him such an indignity....

This, however, had not prevented her from doing full justice to her consummate taste and to the large sums of money which her husband’s professional successes had put at her dis...

THE big hotel in the Boulevard Malesherbes was the outcome of Madame Torialli’s spirit of compromise. To most people compromise means giving up something in order to obtain its...

It was true he agreed to teach her for a sum almost nominal. He professed to take the deepest interest in her voice, and told her, as Jean had never done, that she sang with the...

“I sometimes fear that we work you too hard,” she said wistfully. “I am a vampire for my husband, I sacrifice so many to save him and serve him all I can; and in the end I often...

LOUIS Flaubert was not satisfied with what nature had done for him. It seemed to him that he was born to rival Torialli, and so far facts had disagreed with him. Yet he was far...

It was the hour when Paris awoke; rich, expensive, passionate Paris, and launched itself into swift, tireless motors, racing to and fro through the transient pleasure of the nig...

MADAME Torialli had once told Jean that if he ever wanted a private talk with her he might send his name up to her maid early in the morning, and she would see him in the dressi...

It was Sunday evening in the vast solitude of Cartier’s music room. There was nothing in it but space--a couple of armchairs and the blur of tobacco smoke. The sound of Jean’s p...

JEAN knew that there was one thing more he had to do, and it seemed to him as if it were the only thing in the world left to him to do. He could procure the four hundred francs...

THERE was no meal that Flaubert enjoyed so much as his breakfast. It seemed to him to be the great opportunity of appearing as a grand _seigneur_; for, in his opinion, to take y...

THE days had no separate meaning to Jean; they came upon him with the orderly formation of advancing waves, line upon line, they hung above his little island of consciousness, o...