Eris

The baby was born at Whitewater Farms about nine in the morning, April 19, 1900. Two pure-breed calves,--one a heifer, the other a bull,--were dropped the same day at nearly the...

When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long lane he had travelled for twenty years.

It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and factories would pay them enough in three...

The change came swiftly upon Eris; passed more swiftly still, leaving no outward trace visible. But when it had passed, the heart and mind of Eris were altered. All doubt, all h...

It was Sunday; and it was in May. To Whitewater Farms floated the sound of bells from three village churches, pealing alternately. With a final three strokes from each bell, Ode...

Odell, Ed Lister, and the foreman, Gene Lyford, scrubbed their hands and faces and put on clean white canvas clothes. Clyde Storm, helper, went along the lime-freshened concrete...

June’s magic turned Whitewater to a paradise. Crystal mornings gradually warming until sundown; gentle showers at night to freshen herbage and start a million planted seeds; blo...

July began badly in New York. Ambulances became busy, hospitals overcrowded, seaside resorts thronged. Day after day a heavy atmosphere hung like a saturated and steaming blanke...

“I’m writing it now,” he added, grinning. “Sob-stuff, Xantippe. I’m going to make a little gem of it. It’ll be a heart-yanking tragedy--predestined woe from the beginning. That’...

“I’m having two or three people to dinner,” he remarked, adjusting the camelia in his button-hole. “I hope we won’t be noisy. If we keep you awake, pound on the floor.”

He wrote a note to Eris, promising to stop in very soon; but week-ends interfered. Then, in August, a house party at Southampton, another in Saratoga for the races, and the rema...

He had done twenty stories for Coltfoot in six months. Those stories made Annan. It had finally come to--“Have you read Barry Annan in this week’s number?” That, and a growing h...

Annan signalled a club taxi in waiting; they rolled away together, Coltfoot directing the driver to go to “The Looking Glass”--quite the most charming little motion-picture hous...

Her telegram did this. Disappointment, retrospection, regret, annoyance, sentimental impatience,--these in sequence possessed the young man as he sat holding her telegram. The o...

Annan’s dreary, unpleasant and brilliantly ugly novel was published in April. There were three printings in the first week. Five in the second. In contradistinction to “small-to...

Annan was in a way of being rather pleased with himself. Nobody can remain entirely unshaken by the impact of the sort of flattery hurled in hunks by the Great American Ass.

“Harry Sneyd is giving a supper dance for me,” she explained, “and he wants a bunch of names that will look well in to-morrow’s papers. Do you mind coming, Barry? Or have you be...

But something had happened to this young man. He was in no condition to realise what. His mind, that hitherto faithful ally, seemed incompetent; trivial thoughts thronged its co...

The day was warm enough to be uncomfortable. Except in recesses of parks, New York is never fragrant. Once it was--when the odour of lindens filled the Broad-Way from the Fort t...

Except for one disquieting symptom, Annan had no reason to suppose that his budding affair with Eris was to develop and terminate differently from other agreeable interludes in...

When Annan arrived at the Jane Street apartment, Eris had just telephoned Hattie, the negro maid, that she had been detained at the studio; would be late; and to say this to Mr....

When he did arrive at No. 3 Governor’s Place, Mrs. Sniffen said that Mr. Annan was lying down--that for the last two weeks he had not seemed to be very well.

He could hear her fat feet clattering away along the corridor. An endless, endless wait, almost a quarter of a minute. Steps again on the tiled corridor,--not Hattie’s; then the...

Pressure, due to laziness and ignorance, seldom bears hard on the incompetents who cause it. In this case it was due to hasty organization and Mr. Creevy’s direction. And Eris w...

The barn-like studio was in disorder and it rang all day with a hell of dissonance--infernal hammering, trample of heavy feet, the racket of hoarse voices, scrape of props and e...

Sidewalks still swarmed; tenements had muted and disgorged; every alley spewed women and men in every stage of undress. Fat females with babies at breasts squatted beside dirty...

As Eris was entirely alone in the apartment at night, it had been her custom to lock and bolt her chamber door,--a rough neighbourhood and rear fire-escapes making it advisable.

“I don’t have to work in no such kinda place,” continued the coloured woman doggedly, “and I ain’t a-going to. Mah week’s up Friday, but you pay me up to las’ night an’ I’ll go...

“Miss Odell,” he began, half way up, “the same gentleman that tillyphoned you is downstairs askin’ for you with a taxi-cab. I wouldn’t leave him come up after what the Governor...

The hot, sunny July days they spent in the surf at Long Beach, or in motoring through Westchester. Evenings they dined together on some cool roof, or by the sea, and returned to...

One fine afternoon, a week later, lonely as a dog that has lost its master, and, like a lost dog, finding all things perplexing in the absence of the Beloved, Annan, wandering a...

It was she who offered the serious kiss of parting; she who retained his hand, tender, reluctant, candidly concerned as to his health and welfare if left for a while entirely se...

Other letters were forwarded from Jane Street,--persistent letters from Smull begging to know where she had gone,--abject letters betraying all the persistence of a man who know...

Apropos of Annan and his stories, Coltfoot had made this objection, saying that the literary explosion never seemed to be spontaneous, and charging the author with secreting in...

A young girl got out of the trailer after the coffin was lowered, the grave filled, and the mound deftly shaped. She laid a bunch of wild blue asters and golden-rod on the mound.