The Book of Susan: A Novel

During a long winter of close companionship in study and socially unsocial life this feeling disappeared, but with the spring it gradually formed again, like a little spreading...

One afternoon, five or six days later, I was seated by the white-enamelled iron bed in the small white room. Susan had had a long, quiet, normal nap, and her brisk sparrow-eyed...

"Am I in love with Ambo, or am I just trying to be for his sake? If happiness is a test, then I can't be in love with him, for there is no happiness in me. But what has happines...

I AM an essayist, if anything, trying to tell Susan's story, and telling it badly, I fear, for lack of narrative skill. So it is with no desire to prolong cheaply a possible poi...

My vision of the accident itself--of the manner of its occurrence--might conceivably have been such a fabrication, subconsciously elaborated from the facts given me by Conlon; n...

One night, perhaps a month after Susan had come to me, I returned late from a hot day's trip to New York--one more unsuccessful quest after Hypatia Rediviva--and found Phil and...

It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not near enough to us to do more than r...

It seemed to me, I remember, during our hour's talk together, that Miss Leslie was one of the two or three wisest, most understanding, and sympathetic persons I had ever met. Sy...

I was--in those bad, grossly comfortable old days--that least happy of Nature's experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be an idler, and whose tastes urged hi...

"Well, I've questioned her pretty close, and I think it's to be relied on. It hits me that way. Mrs. Hunt, she says, when she took in Miss Blake's card, was lyin' on her couch i...

As for Susan's Jimmy, his expression was one of desolated amazement. Either his host and his host's friend, or he himself--had gone suddenly mad! The drop of his jaw was parenth...

It was fun trying. I ran down on the eight o'clock to New York and strolled up and down Fifth Avenue, shopping here and there as the fancy moved me. Shopping--with a well-filled...

Jimmy's mother lived with her unwashed brood, you will remember, above old Heinze's grocery store, and on the following afternoon I ran Susan over there for a tactful reconnaiss...

"But _does_ love have to be like an earthquake? If it does, then it's just a blind force, and I don't like blind forces. It's stupid to be blind oneself; but it's worse to have...

He almost snatched the pad from Conlon and tore the blotter cover from it; then he slipped it beneath Susan's right palm and finally thrust his pencil between her curved fingers...

PHIL FARMER and Jimmy Kane stayed on in New Haven that summer of 1914; Phil to be near his precious sources in the Yale library; Jimmy to be near his new job. As soon as his exa...

I am told they eat Chows in China, their native land. If they do, it must be from the motive that drove Plutarch's Athenian to vote the banishment of Aristides--ennui, to wit, k...

IT happens that I twice saw Susan's mother, one of those soiled rags of humanity used by careless husbands for wiping their boots; but Susan does not remember her. John Stuart M...

It was all too much for him; concealment was impossible--he was flabbergasted. Sparkling with sheer delight at his _gaucherie_, Susan put out both hands. Her impulsiveness insta...

"Good gracious, no--since you ask. It's simple enough, though--and pretty vague. Only it feels important--here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to b...

Though it is positively not true that Phil and I, having covenanted on a hands-off policy, were independently hoping for the worst, so far as Susan's ability to cope unaided wit...

"Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn Club. I don't dance very well, but I fig...

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side--unless through a lack of imagi...

"All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo _au pied de la lettre_. I'm not in the least as he's hymned me--but that, surely, you've guessed between the lines. What is...