Embarrassments

I had done a few things and earned a few pence--I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronising; but when I take the little measu...

He hesitated a moment. “The loveliest thing in the world!” We had stopped, and on these words he left me; but at the end of the corridor, while I looked after him rather yearnin...

She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had told me long before that her face was interesting. “Perhaps it won’t go in a letter if it’s ‘immense.’”

I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental detachment that Mrs. Corvick’s public regret quite failed to conceal: it gave me the measure of her consummate...

“How do you know what I wouldn’t do?” my humorous friend demanded. “Of course I’ve thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night. But I can’t help her at all; she’ll...

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes. Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my repo...

He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and conscientiously replied: “Even with...

Once more my hostess genially glared at me. “Did she tell you how much the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty pounds a year.”

“Just so.” Dawling’s face was a windowless wall. He could contribute nothing to the mystery, and, quitting him, I carried it away. It was not till I went down to see Mrs. Meldru...

_The Major Key_ was the new novel, and the great thing accordingly was to finish it; a consummation for which three months of the _Beacon_ had in some degree prepared the way. T...

“I have been butting my skull against a wall,” he had said in those hours of confidence; “and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you’ll allow me the word, you, my dear fellow, ha...

“On what else has he built them from the very first? It’s never the present for him that bears the fruit; that’s always postponed and for somebody else: there has always to be a...

Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in England, hundreds of miles away a...

“Did you think I would fall in love with her? You never alluded to such a possibility before,” he went on as I remained silent. “Admirable person as you pronounced her, that was...

Mine were assuredly urgent, but I found as the days went on that to believe what I “liked” was to believe what I was more and more intimately convinced of. I found also that I d...