His Official Fiancée

Of course I know that for the offence of having kissed a girl who is nothing to him there _is_ no apology a man can make. The mere suggestion of apologizing for that is adding i...

Often, when I’ve imagined something was going to be so easy and delightful, it’s turned out to involve every kind of difficulty and unpleasantness. Like earning my own living in...

At the office, which to my experience seemed to belong to a previous existence, but to my eyes seemed only of yesterday, every familiar object was in its place and unchanged. Th...

I hadn’t been inside the Carlton since the days before the “smash”—the days when I was a young lady of leisure, without an idea that I should presently be toiling in the grimy t...

Thank heaven for the instinct that silenced the welcoming “Billy!” before it broke from my lips. Thank heaven also for that numbness all over me that allowed me to say in a voic...

If a girl were the least bit inclined to fall in love with Billy Waters—and I see now that some girls might be; though not, of course, any girl of my type, capable of this kind...

This was what the Governor said to me this morning when I again presented myself at his desk; this time with the timid “acceptance” which, after poor Jack’s desperate appeal, is...

I should be ashamed to act it as well as I do, if it weren’t that I must keep the whip-hand over the Governor, and that this is the only way, for his mother and sisters are real...

Yes! It was all of a piece with the fiascoes of the day that my little watch gained ten minutes, hurrying me through my dressing and down, before I’d any need for such haste, in...

“I say! _Tots!_ What’s all this?—Look here, what _is_ the meaning of it?” she cried breathlessly. “What’s this wild story about you being engaged to be married? Do say it isn’t...

“Ten past three, by Jove; later than I thought again,” muttered my employer as we reached the office again. “And I’ve got all those letters to get through yet.... Miss Trant, I...

I’ve shown it to the Waters: explained that I must be off at once. Only Theo protested angrily, “Your chum ill? How _careless_ of her just when we were such a jolly party, and g...

And if I am leaving everything—sea and sunshine and mountains—to-morrow, I may as well take in as much of them as I can to-day. Besides, I suppose I shall have to go down some t...

I’ve got a perfectly clear mental image of this mother of an animated tape-machine. Handsome, in a regular-profiled, stately, mid-Victorian style, with steely grey eyes that “co...

“Nancy! I say, Nancy! Here’s Billy and this new man of his turned up _hours_ before we expected them, and mother’s out calling somewhere, and Blanche is in the middle of washing...

In I went—to find the Governor smoking a cigarette and sitting on the wide red-leather-padded club-fender of a room that was in complete contrast to the feminine domain I had le...

“That’s the idea,” he said, turning a little to look at me while I stared straight at the big white-and-blue buses lumbering up the Strand, but saw, clearer than the traffic, th...

“‘_A girl without a sweetheart_,’ girls—(I was readin’ something about it this very morning ’s I was coming along in the Toob),” chattered little Miss Holt over her work. “_A gi...

I simply wasn’t going to let Uncle Albert Waters, left in the dining-room with Major Montresor, imagine that his nephew and I had gone into the den to—to make anything but—music...

It was long and low and white and homely—yes! _homely_-looking—overgrown with purple wistaria, and swept at one end by a fountain of gold from an immense laburnum-tree. A deep,...

In the dressing-room, where Miss Robinson was rinsing out the sooty basin before washing her hands in it, Miss Holt “smarming” her hair-net down over her little brown chocolate...

The large, light room, with its handsome furniture, seemed to stretch for miles between the door and the big writing-desk, covered with green leather, at which Mr. Waters himsel...

We dined; for the first time for well over a year I sat down at a luxuriously-appointed round dinner-table with all its conventional daintiness of perfect napery, silver and gla...

She had darted out of the cottage, hatless, as usual, her nose already peeling with sunburn and her long bare legs covered with midge-bites and sea-holly scratches down to her w...

I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Cl...

Mrs. Waters introduced “Our friend Monsieur Charrier and his daughter”—and the stout gentleman, who wore pale-hued boots shaped like the blades of oars, bowed until I could see...

It was growing dusk in my little bedroom; outside my window veils of purple gauze were drawn over sand-hills and shore, and the tide was far out again by the time I was awakened...

In looks, Uncle Albert Waters was just like the John Bull of the cartoons, minus the hat. In voice, he was Theo through a megaphone. In manner, a genial form of hurricane.