Mrs. Essington: The Romance of a House-party

SHE was late to a late dinner. She found herself last, but felt herself more looked at than mere lateness warranted. Some of the women looked first at her, and then at each other.

DARK had shut down in a weeping mist when the carts from the country club drove up the “Miramar” terrace. The doctor’s dry, professional presence met Mrs. Budd’s voluble anxiety...

STEPPING on to the veranda, Florence found herself in a projected atmosphere of breakfast—the fine aroma of coffee, the strident gaiety of people not too well known to one anoth...

“TO-MORROW’S” sun rose on a miraculous world that dripped and steamed, and breathed a thousand sweet scents into a cloudless sky. The coast road, white for five months with flyi...

THE breeze, which at noon had barely rustled the chrysanthemums, an hour later was tossing the pampas plumes across the lawn, and whipping the great sapphire of the sea into bro...

“STILL I don’t reconcile you with that lot,” the young man broke out, after a silence that had lasted long enough to be intimate. He leaned toward her across the space between t...

NIGHT had come down in a smother of fog made infinitely dreary by the interminable sound of the sea. The two light rigs that had sped on the sand road, through the thick oak sha...

TO Florence everything—leaf, and wind, and the movement of her own blood—seemed to stop and harken to his steps going from her. To him the power and procession of incident were...

THAIR, lounging down to breakfast the morning after the dance, found Cissy Fitz Hugh alone over a demoralized table. She gave him a nod that was cousinly in its curtness, shoved...

The whole thing had gone with such reckless abandon! What had happened to set Julia, with her hot glitter, headlong on such an escapade, to drag Longacre so doggedly after her?...

THE cart drew up at the station with a bounce. Before it had fairly stopped, a large man in the clothes of a working citizen, with the umbrella and bag of a traveler, sprang out...

FLORENCE ESSINGTON woke with a flood of early sun across her bed, and the sound of the ocean in her ears. But the fringes of hardy yellow jessamine around her windows smothered...

SHE wore a gown of sheer white, with a mantle of Spanish lace drawn close over her sloping shoulders and the flowing lines of her arms. Above it her large gray eyes looked out l...

FLORENCE sat down in the window-seat in the dusky hall. The diamond panes of milky glass let in a misty light. She drew the drapery of the dark curtains around her, the better t...