The Dull Miss Archinard

Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating fly, his mind in the musing, imperson...

Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, came into the morning-room just b...

At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of the walk together was very pleasant. She...

"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly bad-tempered. "She said some very clever thin...

The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family relationships a bore, and the cont...

Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, and people said that Mr. Apswith h...

Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation deepened the melancholy to a las...

Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysées in a rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the evening that he had barely had time to...

It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre...

Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had seen much, thought much, done much; ye...

Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central enough, but Peter himself was at her com...

Mary gone, the bicycling tête-à-têtes were resumed, and Odd, too, began to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were bon camarades in the best sense o...

"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his daughter as she came into the drawing-room...

Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The concièrge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the sourness common to her class, as sh...

Peter brought Katherine the engagement ring a few days afterward. The drifting had ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality as most salutary. His personality and he...

It was just past four when Peter walked up the Rue Bonaparte and stationed himself at the corner of the Rue Vavin and the Rue d'Assas, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens.

Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully smart and wintry little figure. Kat...

Hilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his warm body against her feet as he sat on the floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and then and laid it on his head, but absently....

Odd, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of illusions of late; for the regula...

Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would see her at the Meltons' on Monday....

He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety in regard to a prolonged i...

Odd went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he could hardly have told.

Katherine closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened look. She had on her travelling hat and...

For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant devotion that implied, by contrast, wor...

By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something--with anything--and expe...

One October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a party of friends, Hilda knew, and t...

Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a touch of trembling.