Plashers Mead: A Novel

Pauline was conscious that the simple statement was fraught with a significance far greater than anything which had so far happened in her life. It was ringing in her ears like...

"My dear child, it would be, as I believe I remarked, a pleasure. I have the greatest dread of long engagements. My own, you know, lasted five years; and at the end of the time...

"I am sure," she said, "that when my dear father brought this wine back from Portugal he would have been happy to know that some of it would be drunk to the health of two young...

Worse was to come, for it rained every day faster and faster, and there were no journeys for Guy's new canoe. He and Pauline scarcely had ten minutes to themselves, since when t...

That night, however, when the curtains were drawn across Michael's bay window that overhung the whispering and ancient thoroughfare; when the fire burned high and the tobacco sm...

In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket in the high gray wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness all around him, where the invisi...

Guy dragged a chair into the bay window and, balancing his long legs on the sill, he made numerous calculations in which Miss Peasey's wages, the weekly bills for food, and the...

In the middle of the wall confronting the street two columns surmounted with huge round finials showed where there had once been a gate wide enough to admit a coach. Above the w...

The gray-eyed virginal month, that is of no season and must as often bear the malice of Winter's retreat as the ruffianly onset of Spring, had now that very seriousness which su...

And Pauline, with a breath of dismay, was conscious of an inclination to pretend that they had not been here this afternoon. She discovered herself, as it were, proposing to Guy...

The publisher was a short, fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his fi...

Pauline's birthday morning was cloudless, and Guy, though to himself he was inclined to blame the action as weak, went to church and knelt beside her. Then afterwards there was...

Miss Peasey smiled encouragingly with the strained look in her eyes that always showed when she was hoping to find out from his next sentence what he had told her. Guy shouted h...

"You must never do such a thing again," said Mrs. Grey, more crossly than Pauline had ever heard her. "Monica saw you go in as she was walking down Shipcot hill, and she has jus...

Guy, as soon as he had sent off the poems to a publisher, was much less violently driven by the stress of love, which latterly had urged him along so wayward a course. He began...

Mr. Hazlewood sighed with the satisfaction of unburdening himself, and waited for his son to reply, who with a tremendous effort not to spoil the force of his argument by losing...

"If you can't get a chub any other way, you can sometimes get him with a bit of bacon," Willsher was saying. "And I know a fellow who caught one of those whoppers under Marston'...

Your mother came to tea yesterday and brought Monica. Margaret is rather in seclusion at present on account of Richard's arrival, I fancy. She's obviously dreading other people'...

When the papers were settling down, Janet, the maid, came in to say there was a gentleman in the drawing-room, and in the confusion of the new whirlwind her entrance raised Jane...

This sudden apprehension of a tremendous historical fact was rather disconcerting in the way it brought home to him the uselessness of all the information that he had for years...

"I don't think you do. You may suspect. But for that matter, so may I. Isn't what you might have told me something that might most suitably be told on the way to Fairfield?"

"Of course they try," said Birdwood, condescendingly. "But neither them nor their mother don't seem to learn nothing. They think more of a good clump of dellyphiniums than half...

After Monica's question it was no longer possible for Pauline when she was alone to avoid facing the problem of Guy's attitude towards religion. The repression of her anxiety on...

"And surely," Margaret put in, "you didn't really like those stupid mock medieval curtains. No design, just a lot of meaningless fleurs-de-lys looking like spots. It's because I...

They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there were the tapestries even more beaut...

The slow train puffed away into the unadventurous country; and the bees buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again audible. The last farewell that Gu...

Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and, avoiding familiar ways, they reached a barren, cup-shaped field s...