The Ball of Fire

A short, thick old man, grey-bearded and puff-eyed and loaded with enormous jewels, met Gail, Lucile and Arly, Ted Teasdale and the Reverend Smith Boyd, at the foot of the subwa...

Allison helped her into his big, piratical looking runabout, and tucked her in as if she were some fragile hot-house plant which might freeze with the first cool draught. He loo...

The Reverend Smith Boyd came down to breakfast with a more or less hollow look in his face, and his mother, inspecting him keenly, poured his coffee immediately. There was the t...

Interlocutor Ted Teasdale roved his eye over the assemblage, of fifty or more, in his own ballroom, and smiled in a superior fashion. The ebony-faced semicircle of impromptu min...

The grand privilege of Mrs. Jim Sargent’s happy life was to worry all she liked. She began with the rise of the sun, and worried about the silver chest; whether it had been lock...

The Reverend Smith Boyd, rector of the richest church in the world, dropped his last collar button on the floor, and looked distinctly annoyed. The collar button rolled under hi...

Edward E. Allison walked into the offices of the Municipal Transportation Company at nine o’clock, and set his basket of opened and carefully annotated letters out of the mathem...

It was good to be home! Gail wondered that she could ever have been content away from the loving shelter of her many, many friends. She had grown world weary in all the false ga...

“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that charge, but he reflected that it w...

The soft air which blew upon Gail’s cheek was like the first breath of spring, and there was the far-off prophecy of awakening in the very sunshine, as she sped out the river ro...

There began to be strange new stirrings in the world. Money! From the land which was its home and place of abode it leaned over cross the wide seas, and made potent whisperings...

The seven quiet gentlemen who sat with Allison at his library table, followed the concluding flourish of his hand toward the map on the wall, and either nodded or blinked apprec...

On the outbreak of a bygone rudeness between the United States and Spain, one free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan paper, unable to adequately express its violent emotions on...

Gail faltered when, after bidding good-night to her uncle and to Allison, she turned and met the look in Howard Clemmens’ eyes. She knew that the inevitable moment had arrived....

“I hear Miss Gail’s back home.” It was the ice man. He had given her slivers of ice in the days when she had wished that she were a boy.

Music resounded in the parlours of Jim Sargent’s house; music so sweet and compelling in its harmony that Aunt Grace slipped to the head of the stairs, to listen in mingled ecst...

Allison, springing forward with a jerk as he left Jim Sargent’s house, headed his long, low runabout up the Avenue. He raced into the Park, and glanced up at the lookout house a...

Clad in her filmy cream lace gown, Gail walked slowly into her boudoir, and closed the door, and sank upon her divan. She did not stop to-night to let down her hair and change t...

Who was that tall, severely correct gentleman waiting at the station, with a bunch of violets in his hand, and the light in his countenance which was never on sea or land? It wa...

The Reverend Smith Boyd walked slowly out into the dim church, with the little volume in his hand. The afternoon sun had sunk so low that the illumination from the stained-glass...

The _Whitecap_ would have been under way except for the delay of the gay little Mrs. Babbitt and her admiring husband, who sent word that they could not arrive until after dinne...

Allison swept Gail into his arms, and rained hot kisses upon her, crushing her closely to him. She offered no resistance, and the very fact that she held so supinely in his arms...

Vedder Court was a very drunkard among tenement groups. Its decrepit old wooden buildings, as if weak-kneed from dissipation and senile decay, leaned against each other crookedl...

Gaiety consists in rising in the morning so tired that it takes three hours of earnest work with a maid, a masseuse, a physical directress, a hairdresser, and a bonnetiere, befo...

Everybody was at the depot to meet Gail; just everybody in the world! It was midnight when the train rolled in, and, as she came toward the gate, the faces outside, with the hig...

There was something radically wrong with the Fosland household. Gerald’s man had for years invariably said: “Good morning, sir; I hope you slept well, sir.” This time he merely...

Gerald Fosland, known to be so formal that he had once dressed to answer an emergency call from a friend at the hospital, because the message came in at six o’clock, surprised h...

There was a strained atmosphere in the vestry meeting from the first. Every member present felt the tension from the moment old Joseph G. Clark walked in with Chisholm. They did...

“For my thoughts,” she replied, turning to the impossibly handsome Dick Rodley who had strolled up, in his blue jacket and white trousers and other nautical embellishments. “Giv...

Callers for Mrs. Helen Davies, and a huge bouquet of American beauties for Gail. The latter young lady was in the music room, engaged with Chopin and a great deal of pensiveness...

The free and entirely uncurbed enjoyed an unusual treat. It had a sensation which did not need to be supported by a hectic imagination or a lurid vocabulary. Vedder Court had be...

The doves which in summer flitted about the quiet little vestry yard, and cooed over the vestry door, would have flown away had they been at home; for it was a stormy affair, wi...

Silence pervaded the dim old aisles of Market Square Church; a silence which seemed to be palpable; a solemn hush which wavered, like the ghostly echoes of anthems long forgotte...

Gail Sargent became suddenly and acutely aware of an entirely new and ethnological subdivision of the human race. She had known of Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, and the ot...

The map of the United States in Edward E. Allison’s library began, now, to develop little streaks of red. They were not particularly long streaks, but they were boldly marked, a...

Gail, in a pretty little rose-coloured morning robe, with soft frills of lace around her white throat and at her white elbows, sat on the floor of the music room amid a chaos of...