Children of No Man's Land

Aunt Stella assented. “Why shouldn’t she go? Anything for a change, when one is twenty-three. Anything for excitement. And she can come to no harm. Besides, Richard is invited t...

A few days later, Felix Koch came back at an unwonted hour, between dinner and supper, and beckoned his wife to a private conference. Her luminous eyes, as she went, testified t...

Patriotism, even more than bunting-deep, is largely a matter of habit. Before August, nineteen-fourteen, Richard had rather taken his country for granted. Now he awoke to an Eng...

Deb knelt in front of the squat sturdy oil-stove with “CORA” gold-lettered across its front, and began carefully to trickle a supply of kerosene into the tank. Cora was essentia...

The girl who was playing the accompaniments to La llorraine’s singing glanced aside once or twice from Deb to Jenny, contrasting mystery and mobility. Jenny attracted her the mo...

Richard found his Easter holidays dull. Montagu Hall was not a satisfactory substitute for Daisybanks, where he had owned his own carpentering shed in the garden, in which he mi...

“And yet you’re not really humble,” the other laughed. “Ring for tea, Deb. I’m tired of seeing you brooding like a sphinx. The pleasure grows monotonous. I suppose you can’t bro...

The Redburys were at Saturday dinner. Their numbers indicated a party, but in reality no one but the intimate family was present. Mr and Mrs Redbury, their sons Hardy and David;...

Samson Phillips was first and foremost a man of tenacious disposition. He heard Antonia mention that Deb was to be found that Saturday afternoon with a certain person of the nam...

“Why didn’t you turn up last night?” demanded Zoe Dene-Cresswell, stepping in and out of her tiny kitchen in a whirlwind effort to prepare dinner for Pinto, keep “Quelle Vie,” t...

Cliffe Kennedy, entering the Tube at Charing Cross, caught sight of Mr Otto Redbury between the bobbing hats and swaying bodies that crowded up the carriage; and immediately pus...

October brought Samson Phillips to town for six weeks of special signalling instruction. Quite suddenly, from lethargic standing about in the vicinity of Deb, as he had done sin...

But Cliffe Kennedy was indubitably to blame. No one could spend so much time with Cliffe as Deb had done of late, without echoing his tendency to achieve a climax at whatever co...

“I am writing to you, my dear Zoe, from the Café Romanico. But indeed the talk all round me is so loud, I can hardly collect my thoughts. My finger is better, but I have a pain...

Deb was living with La llorraine. She indignantly refused to return home on the understanding that she was to be partially forgiven for an offence she had never committed; on th...

Antonia stood in the empty room in Bayswater, reading a scrawl of explanation which Gillian had left behind for her on the dusty mantelpiece. The floor was littered with bits of...

“If it gets any hotter, I shall be found melted down in one of my own crucibles,” Gillian wailed, to the accidental party of Deb, Nell and Antonia, who had flopped in to see her...

Richard sprang up, knuckles white with the clench of his hands on the rim of the breakfast-table, his brows a lowering black ridge of anger. He and Mr Gryce confronted one anoth...

Deb, before Richard came to her, was afflicted with the hump. A sort of diffused hump. The hump of all the world. The hump that says: “What’s the good?” and “It isn’t fair!” and...

Nell and Timothy lay among thick buttercups. Here and there the shimmering, glazed yellow lifted to circles of pale cowslips. Nell’s russet silk jersey was a splash of deeper co...

“Deb?—oh, she’ll be all right in December,” said Mrs Phillips to Beatrice, and Beatrice to Trudchen Redbury, and Herbert and Abe to Samson, and Samson to Grandmother Phillips, a...

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” David Redbury explained jubilantly to La llorraine; “the Jewish regiment sails to-morrow, and I’ve dragged this fellow out to see me through my fare...

—“And would it be indelicate to ask,” said Gillian, “_why_ I’m suddenly invited to take tea with you, on these lawns of sheer respectability? I’m touched, Deb, really I am; I ev...

All this year of hope and reprieve, Richard had just dimly realized the continuation of Mr Gryce’s attacks; but they had slithered more or less harmlessly off the conviction tha...

Why had he not thought of suicide before this? Looked upon calmly and dispassionately, from a merely business aspect, it was the only course for him—lacking the vital sustenance...