Lummox

She was five feet, nine and a half, of flat-breasted bigness and her cheek-bones were pitched like Norn's. Little tents. There must have been a good smattering of Scandinavian a...

Her splayed lips tried, but were dumb. There was something she so terribly wanted to say to that. A heart hurt. To tell it would be like giving him a jewel.

"Yes, and that's no good. I got a floatin' kidney I have, and I won't lug bathin' water up two flights of stairs in six pitchers full for nobody, not even myself. Yes, a floatin...

Old dreads. The lugging of the carpetbag into strange rear entrances. Strange pots and pans and palates. A family of rich Greeks on Madison Avenue had been kind, but the seasoni...

One night up in her room next to where the winter potatoes were stored, a thought smote Bertha that sent her bounding up from her cot and barefoot over the splintery floor to th...

Spinning tarantellas with broad white toe for pivot. Swaying hip rhythm, eyes slits, like wise smiling old buttonholes. Hands broad on haunches and little bulge of bacchanalian...

The Wallenstein living room overlooked the heads of the buildings opposite and took in a fleeting view of Central Park with an etching of tree, a pagoda on a rock, and a round o...

"Ten years since I been home, Berthie. How I worked when I was a young woman down here to get ourselves out of it and now I got myself out of it how I eat my heart to be back in...

But when he finally did turn his key in the lock, it was as if May, deeply simulating sleep, had been merely lying on the edge of it waiting, so quickly she pounced at him, the...

A long winter that, more like a cloudy November dusk. Annie knotted into her bed and looking out through the door of her room, which she always kept open, upon the two of them m...

It was easy to pass and repass. That is, if one kept shoulders bent into the wind as if with destination. There was a constant trickle of pedestrians along the fine wide avenue....

The mystery of the will to live. Not a morning but what Bertha knew the terrible reluctance of awakening to reality. She came up out of sleep with a struggle, fighting off anoth...

One Wednesday morning someone in the third-floor-back must have been very ill. There was a sweetish, etheric odor in the house, and Mrs. McMurtry hurried back and forth with ice...

"Don't mind my daughter. You know how young people are about doing anything a little off the beaten trail. Come into the house. I want to talk to you. Never mind the servant's e...

Ermangarde and her titillating secret! Dainty little hours of sipping into these books like a bird on the brink of a pool, but she would thrust them beneath a cushion if Bertha...

A silent, eerie little group. Bertha, crouched there beside the bed, because Ermangarde's fingers were tight as wire around her wrist and would not let go. Paula with her queer-...

"Why not? Eddie the chauffeur told me why not. There's no man. He passed out. He wasn't much of a go-getter and old Napoleon sent him down to the coffee plantations and he ate a...

The house stood in a great silent yawn. You found yourself tiptoeing through the halls, and the front shades had not been raised, except for general cleaning, in months. Paula p...

"I don't know, I'm sure. There was some discussion a few days before Olga sailed about that print of Beethoven that used to hang in the dining room. That must in some way be fud...

"I shall take it and give it to the Red Cross: It is your restitution. You should be made to pay a harder one. Now you leave my house. Get out your valise or whatever you call t...

One girl asleep in a chair with neatly closed but fumy lips had to be picked up as if she were a little bag of sachet, crammed into her wrap and handed bodily to one of the youn...

Clank. Clank. One of the children wandered in. Oh, how your heart leaped back, wounded. He had a poor little leg in a brace that clanked. A fat baby, too, only it was as if the...