The Figure in the Carpet

“I DON’T quite know how to explain it to you,” he said, “but it was the very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it was just your exceptional sharpness...

THE effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void of angles that I blushed for the poverty of...

WHEN I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he made me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwend...

RETURNING to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out each in its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a maddening month, in the course of which several thi...

NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware before Corvick’s arrival in England that I shouldn’t be there to put him through. I found myself abruptly cal...

SIX months after our friend had left England George Corvick, who made his living by his pen, contracted for a piece of work which imposed on him an absence of some length and a...

IT was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I beset him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went even so far as to engage him in conversation. Did...

SIX months later appeared “The Right of Way,” the last chance, though we didn’t know it, that we were to have to redeem ourselves. Written wholly during Vereker’s sojourn abroad...

MY words however were not absolutely the same—I put something instead of “angel”; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more apt, for when eventually we heard from our travell...

IT was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for her, and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my power. Her mother’s death had made her means...

I HAD done a few things and earned a few pence—I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronising; but when I take the little measur...