Gentle Julia

They went satirically down the street, their chumminess with one another bountifully increased by their common derision of the outsider on the porch; and even at a distance they...

Julia, like Herbert, had been a little puzzled by Florence's expression of a partiality for the young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for anybody to confess a weakness for...

By the end of October, with the dispersal of foliage that has served all summer long as a screen for whatever small privacy may exist between American neighbours, we begin to pe...

It was a pretty morning, two weeks after Julia's Dance; and blue and lavender shadows, frayed with mid-summer sunshine, waggled gayly across the grass beneath the trees of the t...

Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that...

Throughout that afternoon adult members of the Atwater family connection made futile efforts to secure all the copies of the week's edition of _The North End Daily Oriole_. It c...

It was a pretty room, lightly scented with the pink geraniums and blue lobelia and coral fuchsias that poised, urgent with colour, in the window-boxes at the open windows. Sunsh...

And remembering how Julia had told him that he was killing himself with cigarettes, "All right," he said now, as he bitterly lighted his fifth at the spark of the fourth;--"I ho...

With a proud air she crushingly departed, returning to her own home far from dissatisfied with what she had accomplished. Moreover, she began to expand with the realization of a...

The next afternoon, about four o'clock, Herbert stood gloomily at the main entrance of Atwater & Rooter's Newspaper Building awaiting his partner. The other entrances were not o...

Before she thus set matters right with Noble he had been unhappy and his condition had been bad; now he was happy, but his condition was worse. In truth, he was much, much too h...

"Do you s'pose," she said, at last, in a musing voice: "Herbert, do you s'pose maybe there's some poor family's children somewheres that haven't got any playthings or anything a...

These sympathetic women had unanimously set their expectation in so romantically pessimistic a groove that the most tragic news of Noble would have surprised them little. But if...

Florence looked hurt. "I don't mean you _would_ ask 'em right out. I just meant: Wouldn't you be liable to kind of hint around an' give 'em a chance to tell you how much it was?...

The stairway was crowded as he descended; and as he looked down upon the heads and shoulders of the throng below, in Julia's hall, the thought came to him that since he had the...

A week later, on a hot July afternoon, Miss Florence Atwater, recovered from her cold, stood in the shady back yard of her place of residence and yawned more extensively than an...

Now August came, that florid lazy month when mid-summer dawdles along in trailing greeneries, and the day is like some jocund pagan, all flushed and asleep, with dripping beard...

Although Noble had saluted the old couple so crossly, thus unconsciously making them, as he made the sidewalk, proxy for Mr. Atwater, so to speak, yet the sight of them penetrat...

There was no light in any other part of the house, they discovered, after abandoning the front door bell for an excursion to the rear. "That's disheartening to a hungry person,"...

For a moment Noble was confused; he followed his young friend's discourse but hazily, and Herbert pronounced the word "ant" precisely as he pronounced the word "aunt." The resul...

The hateful entreaty still murmured in her resentful ears, that night, as she fell asleep; and she passed into the beginnings of a dream with her lips slightly dimpling the surf...

Noble Dill came from his father's house, after dinner that evening, a youth in blossom, like the shrubberies and garden beds in the dim yards up and down Julia's Street. All coo...

Mrs. Dill, Noble's mother, talked of organizing a Young Men's Mothers' Club against Julia, nevertheless she acknowledged that in one solitary way Noble was being improved by the...

At six minutes after four o'clock on the second afternoon following Julia's return, Noble Dill closed his own gate behind him and set forth upon the four-minute walk that would...