First the Blade: A Comedy of Growth

It was her own fault, as she candidly admitted to herself—her own, Justin’s a little, still more Mr. Kipling’s, but mainly and responsibly, her own. You observe that she did not...

As a friend and as a needlewoman, Coral was indefatigable. Laura’s trousseau absorbed her and she ended, with the marked approval of Mrs. Cloud and Aunt Adela, not only in conve...

He was to catch the four-twenty. Mrs. Cloud, refusing to admit fatigue after her successful evening on the sofa, was planning to be up again—down, at least, for lunch—ready to s...

When Justin, a fortnight later, heard the story of that afternoon, he was very angry with Laura. Letting his mother go alone! In that state of trouble! Why, a child might have k...

Justin Cloud and Robin Gedge got their commissions on the same day. But while Robin appeared in Brackenhurst every few weeks, bronzed and broadened, to bewail his stagnancy, Jus...

Laura was awakened by a soft warmth upon her cheek, a touch that might have been a kiss or a drifting feather or her kitten’s tentative paw, but was, when she lifted lazy hands...

Now the same gust of rain that was disputing with Laura every inch of her downward path, buffeting her face, twisting invisible hands in her hair, and sopping her shoes till she...

Woman—she will nurse Tom through small-pox, flirt outrageously with Dick, and sell her soul for Harry and enjoy doing it; but refer to them, Tom, Dick and Harry, with collective...

I wonder, Collaborator, if you are out of humour with Laura? She has been, in the last chapter, a trifle—how shall we say?—touchy—ungracious—narrow-hearted? has shown herself a...

Laura, in the days that followed, could not make up her mind about Oliver: did not know what had come over him. She had always intended him to like her, though there was somethi...

Laura handed her basket to the maid, but she had not long to wait. Mrs. Cloud was at home, quite eagerly at home to an opportune Laura. Laura wondered at the warmth of her greet...

It was a very pleasant little dinner-party. Everybody had been cheerful and talkative, and pleased with everybody else. The new curate was as neutral as a curate should be and a...

We talk of the formation of character, as if character were not already triumphant in the infant that defies its father and seduces its grandmother months before it can speak. W...

If, a year or two later, you could have persuaded Mrs. Cloud to tell you her thoughts, she would have said that she always considered the engagement ring to be at the bottom of...

As usual, you are perfectly right. The first thing, I agree, is to decide where to begin; that is, to discover at what period Laura and Justin, who, after all, interest themselv...

Up and up and up went the train and Laura’s spirits with it. Mrs. Cloud was in one corner of the compartment and Justin in the other, and there were two squares of glass, unlike...

Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the beloved mongrel who was poisoned, and Grandmamma, and birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had explained it all to her at the ti...

If Justin had stayed in the garden with Laura—if the curate had found it pleasanter to make a fourth at bridge than to flirt with Annabel Moulde—if Laura had been a year or two...

Do you remember Topaz? Do you remember that ball of pride and red fur with the inscrutable eyes and erect tail and no heart at all as far as I was concerned?

I suppose that we all know summers and summers and—The Summer—the one summer into which, for whatever reason, all the forgotten others pour their glories, so that for ever it gl...

Justin’s next leave was nominally due in June. In September he began to be hopeful of getting it: his Christmas epistles were models of linguistic control: and he arrived soon a...

Since the day of her engagement she had been aware, underneath her happiness, of certain inadequacies, fallings short in herself or—was it possible?—in Justin. Preposterous! She...

She was sixteen when she discovered (inaccurately) that England is an island, that beyond its waters again there is what, superficially if deceptively, you call land, and what y...

It seems to be a fact that love, like the camel, can live on its own resources for a length of time that amazes the less fantastic and incalculable rest of creation; but it is e...

‘Once upon a time’—and we pull in our deep chairs, you quietly, I with a quick impatient jerk that scrabbles up the hearth-rug and worries your tidy soul. But you yourself have...

If you had asked Laura what heaven was like, she would have answered, almost involuntarily—“‘A bald head,’” and Wilfred and James would have tumbled over each other in their anx...

Laura had wanted Justin to come with her to see the last of Coral. She knew that Coral would expect it: she was of the class that could be genuinely moved in public. But she kne...

Though its anticipation and memory can fill a lifetime, the actual emotion must inevitably measure its intensity by its brevity. Ecstasy and despair, those hill-tops of human ex...

Travelling north, they travelled backwards from early summer, through late and middle spring, and came to their own hill-top at last, to find the roads still grey and wrinkled w...

How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten than towns pass...

The birds were half awake, chirruping, as it seemed in that stillness, loud and shrill, tuning up for the concert that was to come; but the trees had still their motionless carv...

The funeral of old Mr. Valentine, the ‘To Let’ board on Green Gates, and the cottage into which the Miss Valentines were to move at the March quarter, gave Brackenhurst a pleasa...

She was to meet the Clouds at Lucerne. She had hoped for Paris, but there was the Swiss-German adorer who would not be denied. Laura never found it easy to deny. So she spent a...

The spring and summer passed like one of those interminable nightmares whose horror is in the fact that it is ever about to be revealed, and never is revealed, to the dreamer. M...

Will you take a peep at Laura in bed with the remains of a cold, on her chill March birthday—Laura, very sorry for herself, languidly undoing her presents—miraculously cured by...

Justin hurried off down the road. Laura waited a little while, looking after him, ready to wave and smile if he should look back. He would have seen, if he had been Oliver to pe...