Christmas Roses and Other Stories

“Oh--you can’t ask me that! I saw you in it and you saw me!” Mr. Darley exclaimed. “You _will_ be straight with me? You saw that soulless life of hers, with that selfish figureh...

On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I perfectly understood Vera’s state of mind...

“Oh--I can’t! I can’t!” said Christopher Darley. “How could I accept it from you? Already you’ve been unbelievably beautiful to me. It’s not as if you were a Bohemian sort of cr...

It was the next morning that Vera showed me how little she was able to bear it. She had kept me singularly busy, as if afraid that I might wave a magic wand even more transformi...

“I don’t want to bother Effie about it,” he said;--E. had stood for Effie--“she’s a dreamy creature and very forgetful. But it’s quite evident to me that the rector and his wife...

“Nobody has ever really understood me--till you came,” she said, sitting upright now beside him, the lovely colour in her cheeks delicately heightened, her eyes shining while sh...

"Until now? While he was here? Oh, no, I have been lonely. Even before he came, even though my life was so crowded, it was rather lonely. I never had any one of my own, for myse...

“As for my being better off, since you are kind enough to take an interest in that aspect of my situation,” she went back, “Christopher hasn’t, it’s true, as much money as Niel....

A very insignificant man, for all his height and his big forehead. Altogether of The Beeches, Arlington Road. Had he turned grey, he might have looked less shabby, but dark thin...

Delicate as he had always been, and ineffectual, as he had always so dejectedly been aware of being, he, too, with all his relatives, had thought it very fortunate when, on leav...

“No, I’ve not hurt myself,” said Mrs. Dallas. “I’ve been hurt, perhaps; but I’ve not allowed my hurts to repeat themselves too often. Some things in life should be unique and fi...

Yes, it was safe in Florrie’s competent hands, dear little room. In her heart of hearts, though she had no faintest flicker of criticism or comparison except for that one strang...

She followed the path, looking down at them, and she seemed to feel Jack’s little hand in hers and to see, at her side, his nut-brown head. It had been on just such a morning. S...

They came on a hot June afternoon both very tired, while we were all having tea on the west terrace. The Tommies--there were over a dozen of them, with two Red Cross nurses to t...

It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them, tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themse...

It was a pretty cottage he found, as, on the September evening, his station fly drew up at the wicket-gate. They had come a long way from the station, and, after leaving a small...

But he was not to go from her uncomforted. She found the firmest voice in which to answer him, stroking his hair and pressing him to her with the full reassurance of her resolut...

She was a small, very shapely woman, soft and curved and compact. Her coiffure would have looked old-fashioned in its artifice and elegance, and with its “royal fringe,” were it...

THEY were coming up everywhere in their sheltered corner on the wall-border, between the laurustinus and the yew hedge. She had always loved to watch their manner of emerging fr...

And now Tim’s letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in her heart, as she worked and ponde...

The conservatory was of the sort that crops out irrelevantly at the back of the many suburban houses, like glaucous fungi; but in Miss Glover’s little establishment, its shelves...

He walked, miserable, and his mind full of a whirling darkness, beside her, determining only that she should be the first to speak again. She was. She had quite come out of her...