People Like That: A Novel

One of the advantages of being an unrequired person of twenty-six, with an income sufficient for necessities, is the right of choice as to a home locality. I am that sort of per...

Kitty came to see me yesterday. Her mortification at my living in Scarborough Square is poignant. Not since she learned of my doing so has her amazement, her incredulity, her in...

Kitty's mother had been dead only a year when Aunt Matilda, who had adopted me several years earlier on the death of my parents, married her father. I was twelve and Kitty eight...

I did not tell Selwyn I was coming to Scarborough Square to live. I told no one. The day after I reached here I sent him a note, giving him my new address.

I was out of the door before Selwyn had left the window. Quickly he followed me, however, and on the front porch, where Mrs. Mundy was already standing, we stood for a half-mome...

I don't understand Mrs. Mundy. She acts so queerly about the girl we found on the street last night. She put her to bed, after she had recovered from her fainting spell, on a co...

"Your fur coat is the only one in Scarborough Square. A sure-enough fur one, I mean. There're plenty of imitations. Mrs. Crimm's got an imitation. You look awful grand in that f...

As we entered the kitchen, a tiny room with one window in it, I glanced around it as I had done at the front room, the two seeming to complete the suite occupied by Mrs. Gibbons...

Bettina, who had opened the door for Selwyn on his last visit, and who had informed me the next day that she had "shivered with trembles" because of his great difference to the...

For the past ten days I have been a very restless person. Mrs. Mundy looks at me out of the corners of her kind and keen and cheery little eyes when she does not think I am noti...

A sickness which Jimmy could not understand was indeed upon me, and unsteadily I leaned against the window-frame, looking at, but not seeing, him, and not until he spoke again d...

Yesterday, over the telephone, Kitty reproached me indignantly for not coming oftener to see her. Each week I try to take lunch or dinner with her, but there have been weeks whe...

I have not seen Selwyn since the night of Kitty's dinner-party. He has been back three days. If he wished to see me before he went away, why does he not come to see me now? Dail...

A moment later we were up-stairs. "I don't know why I am so cold." My hands, not yet steady, were held out to the leaping flames. "Usually I love a snow-storm, but to-day--"

"When the snow's gone and the sun shines, the cot can be rolled out, I told the doctor," Mrs. Mundy tucked the covering closely around the shrinking figure, "but chill and dampn...

Selwyn closed the door, put his hat and overcoat on a chair beside it, and came over to the fire. Standing in front of it, hands in his pockets, he looked at me. I, also, was st...

Late that evening I had a talk with Mrs. Mundy. I told her where Etta Blake lived, that is, where she could find the house from which I had seen her come with the baby in her ar...

Mrs. Mundy cannot find Etta Blake. She went this morning to the house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A "For Rent" sign is on it. After trying, withou...

With eyes apparently on Mrs. Swink, I missed no movement of her daughter, and when presently I saw her put her elbow on the window-sill and wipe her lips with her handkerchief,...

As Selwyn and David Guard shook hands, eagerness of desire must have been in my face, for Selwyn, turning, seemed puzzled by what he saw. Going into the room adjoining my sittin...

Jimmy followed me into the taxi, and as Selwyn snapped the door he huddled in an opposite corner as if effacement were an obligation required by the situation in which he found...

The one day in the year I heartily hate is the first day of January. Yesterday was January first. Its usual effect is to make me feel as the grate in my sitting-room looks when...

"It's pretty beastly in me to put this on you." Selwyn, who had taken his seat in a chair opposite mine, first leaned back, then forward, and, hands clasped between his knees, l...

Telling Madeleine not to unpack her bags, I gave her one of my kimonos and ordered her to lie down while I slipped down-stairs for a few words with Mrs. Mundy. There was time fo...

By the time we learn a few of the lessons life teaches we stop living. I should have known it is the unexpected that happens, but I forgot it. What I expected at Claxon did not...

Many undeserved blessings have come to me in life and have made me temporarily meek and humble, but when punishments come which are unwarranted, meekness and humility (of which...

For two weeks Etta Blake refused to come to Mrs. Mundy's, refused to see the latter when she went to see her, to see me when I went; but yesterday she came to both of us. Ten da...

Stumbling back as if struck, Harrie leaned against the door-frame, and the hat in his hand dropped to the floor. Selwyn, too, for a half-minute drew back, then he came inside an...

I know I should not think too constantly about it. I try not to, but I cannot shake off the shock, the horror of Etta's death. Selwyn inclosed the note she wrote him in the lett...

My hands in his, Selwyn looked long at me, then again drew me to him, again raised my face to his. "A thousand times I've asked. A thousand times could give myself no answer. Wh...