Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty

To-day I went to Mary's wedding, and it has made me very thoughtful. She was very lovely--a great, blooming blonde, the image of Roger. They were a fine pair, as he held her on...

I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman...

I find to my surprise that these rambling chapters, intended, in the first place, as a sort of study of Margarita's development under the shock of applied civilisation, have gro...

Long periods of time passed; days perhaps, perhaps years. Some one, I know, turned with difficulty on his side, so that the puddle did not choke his mouth and nostrils. Some one...

It goes without saying that I have a retentive memory. Of course I depend very largely upon it for all the small details that Roger has from time to time vouchsafed me in regard...

I have hitherto said nothing about the Bank, for the best of reasons--I hate it. I hated it, I think, from the day when a letter from one of my father's friends introduced me to...

To-day I dived into one of my boxes for some warmer underclothing and stumbled upon a pair of rubber-soled shoes for deck wear. They brought the great boat before me in a flash...

At last even we could eat no more, and Roger pulled out an old pipe that I had never seen before, pushed a jar of fragrant tobacco toward us, brought us pipes from the chimney-p...

That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the f...

Roger told me afterward that he literally could not say if it were five seconds or five minutes that he looked into the girl's eyes. He has since leaned to the opinion that it w...

I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her _debut_ in _Faust_. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for...

I remember so well the morning of the great discovery. It was one of those damp, rainy, grey days when happy people can afford to realise contentment indoors, and we were a very...

Well, they stayed the month nearly out, and then Roger took a fancy to see the Island in winter, and I, hugging to my breast the consciousness of that furnace, was easily persua...

They left in October that year; Margarita to get ready for her _debut_, Roger, quiet and inscrutable, to work, as he said, at his treatise on Napoleon. He had grown deeply inter...

The day that Roger and I first met is as clear in my mind as if, in the current phrase, it were but yesterday. I was a slender little lad of ten and he a great, strapping fiftee...

There is nothing more certain than that the bare facts of life are misleading in the extreme. This is doubtless nature's reason for concealing the human skeleton; it is undeniab...

Frederick died here a week ago. His heart, you know, was never very good, and the strain of his last concerts was too much for him. They were very successful, and just before I...

You will be surprised, doubtless, to hear from an old woman who is _perfectly unknown_ to you in all probability, but if your mother is still living she will remember Agatha Upg...

It is easy to see that I should have made a poor novelist; it has been hard enough for me to give you any idea of scenes I did not myself witness, even though I had Roger and Ma...

I don't know how long we sat silent on the beach. Such silence was never embarrassing to her, because it seemed perfectly normal and usual, and I was too busy with my thoughts t...

Kitchener and I were very philosophic as we crossed the Channel that fine day in April. We had got thoroughly fitted to each other, now, the rough edges smoothed down, all idios...

When he woke it was full sunset. The lonely reefs were red with it, (O Margarita, well I know that hour! Do you remember our talks?) the point of land seemed drowned in it, and...

Your mother, I am sorry to say, is not physically able to answer your surprising and most disturbing letter, and has laid upon me the unpleasant task of doing so. It is, as you...

Roger Bradley was walking up Broadway. This fact calls sharply for comment, for he had not done it in years; the thoroughfare was intolerable to him. But one of its impingements...

I flung myself down on the beach behind a big rock, so that I was completely cut off from the cottage, and stared at the sun rising, though it might as well have been the moon f...

First about the will--how splendid it was! Nothing could have pleased Roger more, I am sure--he told me with that queer, little whimsical grimace of his that it cleared his cons...

What must you think of me for delaying so long to write, after the few curt words I found for you that night? I hope you know that something must have kept me and have forgiven...

The station lights flared pale in the coming dawn. Behind the barred window of the ticket-office, which contained, as its bright lamp showed, a tumbled cot bed and a dilapidated...

It was mid-August, however, before I reached that part of America that was destined to mean so much to me. A visit to Mrs. Upgrove, my mother's old friend, extended itself beyon...

But to go back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield...

Clear as I am on a thousand little points that concern my first meeting with Margarita, my mind is a perfect blank when I try to recall the events of the next half hour. We must...

She sang her French roles in Germany and three times in _Siegfried_, and was getting ready for Paris again when a long letter from Alice Carter besought us all to come to Boston...

Come, my mother that carried me, Make me to-night an olden spell! Try if my witch wife loves the Sea, Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me, Then hey, for heaven or...

And is it I that must sit and spin? And is it I that my hair must bind? I hear but the great seas rolling in, I see but the great gulls sail the wind.

Like a white snake upon the sands She's writhing in the crispy foam, She holds her soul in her open hands, And now she staggers and now she stands, And now she runs to her husba...

Alas my son that grew so strong! Alas those hands I stretched to th' bow! Or e'er thou heardst that wanton's song, I'd shot thee long ago and long, Through the black heart that'...

Ay cross your brow and cross your breast For never again ye'll smile, Sir Hugh! Ye flouted them that loved ye best, Now ye must drink as ye did brew.

O woe's the day you saw the maid, And woe's the song she sang the sea, In hell her long black hair she'll braid, For ne'er a soul at all has she!

He's left his flocks, his fields, his kine, He's left his folk and friends and all, He's off to watch the cold sea shine, To brew for aye the salt sea brine, The mermaid hath Si...

Now sit thee down, my bride, and spin, And fold thy hair more wifely yet, The church hath purged our love from sin, Now art thou joined to homely kin, The salten sea thou must f...

O father, mother, let me be, Never again shall I have rest. For as I lay beside the sea, A woman walked the waves to me, And stole the heart out of my breast.