Paradise Garden: The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment

Fortunately for me, neither Jack Ballard nor the expected overflow from the Van Wyck house-party came to disturb the serenity of my thoughts, Jack being suddenly called to Newpo...

Una and her mother did not come to Horsham Manor during the following week, and it was early in June before Jerry ordered the rooms to be prepared for them. Jack Ballard, too, h...

It is not my intention to dwell too long upon the first stages of my tutorship, which presented few difficulties not easily surmounted, but it is necessary in order to understan...

But the madness of the moment had gotten into my blood and Jack's. The fight was going to take place. We were glad of it. We felt the magnetism of the crowd, the pulse of its ex...

Jerry's destiny was indeed in the lap of the gods. Whatever may have been my hope, during his visit to the Manor, of opening his eyes, I now confessed myself utterly at a loss....

Outside the restaurant I changed my plans. I decided not to go to Flynn's that afternoon, for I wanted Jerry to understand how little I was in sympathy with his prize fight. And...

The three weeks of training passed quickly and Carty had won his fight, a favorable augury for the camp of Flynn. Jerry worked hard, too hard it almost seemed for flesh and bloo...

There was something particularly brutal to me in hearing this estimate of Marcia Van Wyck's visit to Jerry through the lips of a servant. And yet I felt no remorse at encouragin...

Thanks to the formidable size of Jerry's training partners, we had managed to avoid the reporters at the Garden, and when we reached Jerry's house we gave instructions to the bu...

I should very much like to have been present while Jerry made some of his visits to the house of the girl Marcia in order to have heard with my own ears what she said to Jerry i...

Had I not been obsessed with the desire at all costs to divert the unhappy tide of Jerry's infatuation, I must have known that no girl such as Una Habberton could lend herself a...

I obeyed. There was nothing left for me to do. Our afternoon had ended in disaster, but I was not sorry. I had thought from all Jerry had told me that he was beginning to awaken...

This memoir is not so much the history of a boy or of a man as of an experiment. Therefore I will not longer delay in bringing Jerry to the point where my philosophy and John Be...

Something went wrong with Jerry's afternoon, for not long after lunch I heard his machine in the driveway. But I didn't go out to meet him. I knew that if there was anything he...

Little by little the story came from him. Perhaps I urged him but I think the larger impelling motive to speak was his conscience which drove him on to confession. He needed ano...

In hearing from Jack Ballard's own lips the story of Jerry Benham's first appearance in Broadway I was forcibly reminded of the opening cantos of the Divine Comedy where Dante f...

It was at Jerry's request that I stayed on at Horsham Manor, working as I could upon my book, and now I think with a new knowledge of the meaning of life as I had learned it thr...

Of course, I had made an enemy of the girl and to no purpose. I had felt her physical attraction, and I knew that only by putting myself beyond its pale could I be true to my ow...

That afternoon when Jerry returned to the Manor he gave me a superficial account of the adventure--so superficial and told with such carelessness that I was not really alarmed....

Jerry came down to the breakfast table attired in tweeds of a rather violent pattern, knickerbockers and spats. He wore a plaid shirt with turnover cuffs, a gay scarf and a hand...

I sat in my corner sipping tea. Being merely a man, middle-aged and something of a misogynist into the bargain, I was aware that as an active, useful force in this situation, I...

With Ballard the elder, to whom and to those plutocratic associates, as had been predicted, my antecedents and acquirements had proven satisfactory, I journeyed on the twelfth o...

It might be better if Jerry Benham wrote his own memoir, for no matter how veracious, this history must be more or less colored by the point of view of one irrevocably committed...

Having decided upon a course of action, I lost no time in setting forth, following the Sweetwater to the wall and then, not finding Jerry, making as though by instinct for the c...

On my way back to the Manor house I thought deeply of a way to make the best of the situation. That Jerry was a philosopher seemed for the moment to be a matter of little import...

But all other considerations were as nothing beside the mystery of Jerry's manner and appearance, and his sudden flight filled me with the gravest fears. What had he done at Bri...

It is with some reluctance that I begin these chapters dealing with the most terrible event in Jerry's life, and for that matter the most terrible experience in my own, for as t...