The Combined Maze

You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner of his birth. It was in the early...

All that winter Ransome's nights and days were regulated in a perfect order--making statements of account for nine hours on five days of the week and four on Saturdays. Three ev...

To the Gymnasium of the London Polytechnic you ascended (in nineteen-two) as to a temple by a flight of steps, and found yourself in a great oblong room of white walls, with whi...

At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, recalling something. Low and square-towered, couchant in the moonlight behind its railings, the Parish Church guarded under its l...

Not that Mrs. Ransome was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolu...

Ranny had received his first intimation that he was not a free man. And it had come upon him with something of a shock. He had made his burst for freedom five years ago, when he...

It was after that evening that he observed a change in her, a change that he could neither account for nor define. It seemed to him that she was trying to avoid him, and that he...

That night Ransome was more than ever the prey of thought, if you could call it thought, that mad racing and careering of his brain which followed his encounter with Miss Usher....

He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet southward as he would, they wer...

For Ransome was convinced that it never could have happened if he had not gone with Wauchope on Sunday evening to that Service for Men. He used to say that if you traced it back...

The symptoms of its working were a frightful haste, anxiety, and fear. He left Wauchope without any explanation, and rode off to his appointment at a dangerous speed and with a...

Winny Dymond was sitting on the edge of Violet's bed in the little back room in St. Ann's Terrace. Violet, in a white petticoat and camisole, overcome by the heat, lay stretched...

Ransome had barely risen from that sleep of exhaustion when he realized the disastrous character of the night's adventure. He was no longer uplifted by any sense of sanction and...

Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage. Violet herself would have continued it; she had meant to continue it; she had fought the point passionately...

On that night Ransome acquired a dreadful knowledge. Granville was not a place where you could be born with any decency. It seemed to participate horribly in Violet's agony, to...

People Ransome hardly knew and didn't care for, friends of his mother and of his Aunt Randall, came over of a Sunday afternoon to see the Baby. And Wauchope and Buist and Tyser...

April put an end to their separation. April, like a second honeymoon, made them again bride and bridegroom to each other. Nature, whom Ranny had blasphemed and upbraided, triump...

Besides, the Baby got over it. With all its accusing and witnessing, it was, as Ranny said, a forgiving little thing; it had never in its life done anybody any harm. It did not...

Ever since his marriage he had kept Leonard Mercier at a distance. He had had to meet him, of course, and Violet had had to meet him, now and again at dinner or supper in his fa...

He remembered, because it was a Saturday, Saturdays and Sundays being the landmarks of his existence by which alone he measured the distances and marked the order of events. The...

On Monday morning when Violet got up she was seized with a slight dizziness and sickness. It passed off. She declared that earthquakes shouldn't stop her going to Richmond, and...

That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there was no end to the scenes she mad...

He rose and went to the fireplace mechanically. His impulse was to tear up and burn Violet's letter and thus utterly destroy all proof and the record of her shame. He was restra...

He had been incapable of thinking until now, the first moment (since it had happened) that he had been left alone. Last night the thing had stupefied him so that he could not th...

In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which was not to be in Ranny's house m...

It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his home, in that hurried, surreptitious fli...

She wrote imploring him to set her free. It was rooted in her, the fear that he would compel her to come back, that he had the power to make her. She wanted (he seemed to see it...

Thus nineteen-seven, that dreadful year, rolled over into nineteen-eight. By nineteen-ten, at the very latest, Ransome looked to get his divorce. He had no doubt that he could d...

He had seen her home. At her door in the quiet Avenue he had held her in his arms again and kissed her. Her eyes shone at his under the lamplight.

Mrs. Ransome for the first time in her life was thinking. She called it thinking, although that was no word for it, for its richness, its amplitude, its peculiar secret certaint...

Nobody had seen them, for at this hour Acacia Avenue was deserted. The long monotonous pattern of it stretched before him, splendidly blurred, rich with lamplight and rain, bord...

She continued. "You see, dear, it comes to the same thing. If you didn't take her back I couldn't marry you, for it wouldn't be you. You'll have to take her."