Star-Dust: A Story of an American Girl

There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable spring day that Lilly Penny walked out...

Cramped from the long period of taut waiting, she was so dry of throat that in spite of constantly sipped water she could only gulp her reply to Miss Neugass's knock and eagerly...

Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers...

"The Web" was tried out in Baltimore the following April, Zoe, Ida Blair, and Bruce Visigoth traveling down on the same train with the company. It cost Lilly a pang for Zoe to m...

They rattled over the cobblestones until her very flesh shivered, and she bit into her tongue and her hands bounced as they lay in her lap, and, trying to peer out of the window...

She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the continuity of a sequence of events...

She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition for this chair one-half inch clos...

There was no egress for Lilly's state of panic. It hurled itself into this and that _cul-de-sac_, only to dash into a black, a colossal wall of ignorance builded on the sands of...

An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Ores...

As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her daughter, toward a subject about whic...

With a flaying intensity that kept her teeth unconsciously ground together so that when she relaxed their pressure the gums fairly sang, Lilly took up her work in the office of...

The following months of her life always seemed to Lilly to have hung suspended without any forward march to them, and entirely surrounded with a colorless fluid which distorted...

She was more tired than she knew and for days after the tragedy went about with a springy little sob just behind her throat, which was perpetually taut from holding back tears.

When Lilly returned to the Broadway Melody Shop that morning following, there was already a voice driving with such nasal power into the sidewalk din that she hardly needed to e...

For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in a clinging fog that feathered the th...

Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of which, by the way, lurks in the cupboa...

One hot Saturday afternoon, at least a twelvemonth later, as Lilly was rushing down from the children's department of one of Broadway's gigantic cut-rate department stores, she...

The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending refreshments in the dining room shut off with...

When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly...

Latitudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans--those who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line separates the tropic of candescence, fas...

Center High School, the city's only at a time when half a million souls beat up like sea around it, a model and modern institution that was presently and paradoxically to become...

She was not afraid. The blood was rocking in her veins like a sea, and she was raging with an anxiety that mounted as the heliotrope dusk, turping out sky lines, began to blow i...

There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had been in burning rehearsal, so scut...

Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day, had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared...

It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs creeping closer and closer to the edg...

There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of sooty black hair which he tried to japan down with a pair of swift military brushes, in the way of woman's...

The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn belt shriveled of thirst. The automobi...

The St. Louis of Lilly's little girlhood, sprung so thrivingly from the left bank of the Mississippi and builded on the dead mounds of a dead past, was even then inexplicably tu...

By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own sheer sappiness, which vitalized her,...

WANTED:--Refined young woman of good appearance and soprano voice, to sing in music store. Must be able to accompany self. Apply between twelve and six. Broadway Melody Shop, 14...

There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the bridge. He was just that, a small m...

At seven o'clock her husband awakened with an ejaculation that landed him sitting on the bed edge. She lay with her eyes closed, wanting not to blink. He dressed silently, but s...

There is a sense of detachment from this old planet of ours goes with travel, that is not unlike that instant when the pole vaulter's feet are farthest off ground. It seemed to...

A certain depression seemed to settle over him the evening following, after they had dined at a Broadway restaurant and were spending the interim before theater in the lobby of...

When Zoe Penny was still in knee frocks she graduated, first in her class, from the public grade school. It was a period of great stress for Lilly, of happy shopping and the swe...

At eleven o'clock Mrs. Becker, hatted, crossed the sun-bleached street, carrying outheld something that wetted through the snowy napkin that covered it. At the door she surrende...

"Never mind, Lilly, you'll have the prettiest graduation dress of them all. I've got Katy Stutz engaged for three days in the house. A girl don't have to be so smart."

From now on for many a month to come, the curve of Lilly's life would have shown a running festoon; six days whose uneventful continuity was bearable because they were looped up...

The day that followed seemed to Lilly vague with a sort of fog. A disturbing something lay against her consciousness and one of her unquiet nights was filled with the unaccounta...

"Ben, we must go housekeeping. It's an outrage to board, with a girl Lilly's age. Not as much as a parlor for her to bring her friends, and a great big girl like her without a r...

When Lilly Becker eked out with one hand that most indomitable of pianoforte selections, Rubinstein's "Melody in F," her young mind had a habit of transcending itself into some...

Two weeks before Christmas such a gale of house-cleaning swept through the Neugass apartment that the scoured smell of pine-wood floors and the scrubbed taste of damp matting lu...

One wall of the Becker back parlor was darkly composed of walnut folding doors dividing it from the front-parlor bachelor apartment of Mr. Hazzard, city salesman for the J.D. Ni...