Category: Short Stories
Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive c...
She wavered a moment. “I am not well enough to walk up to the village this afternoon,” she said at length. “Will you come back later and hear my confession here?”
9. Chapter 9“Done with each other? I wish to God we had!” He rose nervously and tossed aside the review from which my approach had diverted him. “Look here,” he said, standing before me, “R...
11. Chapter 11Meanwhile I had finished my course of studies, and the old Count, on my twenty-first birthday, had appointed me priest of the parish of Siviano. It was the year of Count Andrea’...
10. Chapter 10pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes. Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous _frittura_ sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while...
8. Chapter 8“Of course,” he went on earnestly, “your valuation is based on the fact that the picture isn’t signed--Mrs. Fontage explained that; and it does make a difference, certainly. But...
1. Chapter 1Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of...
2. Chapter 2“Well, the winter passed, and spring was well forward, when my grandmother one evening had a bad fright. That it was her own fault I won’t deny, for she’d been down the lime-wal...
5. Chapter 5Keniston had always scrupulously fulfilled his duty to the mother and sister whom his marriage had dislodged; and Claudia, who had the atoning temperament which seeks to pay for...
3. Chapter 3As recorders of their parent’s domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled. They always had an interesting anecdote to impar...
7. Chapter 7_Ventnor_. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor? Why, I remember every weed in th...
4. Chapter 4“Say it? Why, the facts will say it,” he exulted. “The baldest kind of a statement would make it clear. When a man is as big as that he doesn’t need a pedestal!”
6. Chapter 6She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness. “But that isn’t all,” she wailed. “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve explained to her. It doesn’t do away with the fact...
13. Chapter 13During the weeks that followed I had no time to ask myself the meaning of it all. My one business was to keep him alive if I could. I fought the fever day and night, and at leng...