The Human Interest: A Study in Incompatibilities

One dull afternoon--and it was in summer--a London authoress of some repute, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, was wandering along the pavement of a dull and imposing street in Ne...

“But then, you know, I have never seen your husband,” Egidia was saying to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very easy chair, her feet upheld to t...

Mrs. Elles took a ticket for London. The train was due to leave in ten minutes. She was out of breath and felt the compromising colour mounting to her cheeks under her thick whi...

A maid deposited a can of hot water, and knocked at Mrs. Elles’ door next morning, as the latter had desired her to do over night. Thinking, perhaps, of her faithful Jane, she s...

Mrs. Elles had arrived at Rokeby on a Monday. When Sunday came round, she had been prepared for the usual flying in the face of Philistine custom and observance that prevailed i...

Mrs. Elles never put the spectacles on again. They had made no difference--except to herself. And further intimacy with Rivers convinced her that any such artificial safeguards...

She was lying on her bed at the “Heather Bell,” with only a very confused recollection of what had happened, and a bandaged foot that hurt dreadfully. A doctor had been sent for...

Two days after this incident, of which she naturally remained unaware, Mrs. Elles was well enough to walk across three fields to meet the artist on his way back from his work. S...

She cried a great deal--and she slept a little. She would have died sooner than own it, but luckily for her newly developed sense of veracity, there was no one to question her o...

She was only thirty, she had presumably as many years again to live, and she had no intention of committing suicide. On the contrary, she meant to go through the process known a...

It was the cook who answered it, not the new parlour maid. The cook, whom Mrs. Poynder worked hard and bullied, was in consequence a firm ally of the young and far niente mistre...

Egidia laid her head on her hands. The tale of Brignal Banks had been told. “Good God!” she said passionately. “And it is to Edmund Rivers that this thing has happened!”

Egidia used her novelist’s privilege of supposed social emancipation sometimes, and braved conventionalities. She went once--or twice--to see her cousin in his studio. It was ob...

Dr. André was waiting for her in the dim-lighted halls of the New Gallery, where large-eyed solemn-faced women, some of them so like Egidia, as she thought, looked down from the...

She was full of purpose. Jane Anne Cawthorne was the worst enemy of the two that she had taken under her protection--Jane Anne Cawthorne was prepared to swear falsely--Jane Anne...

She drove up to Queen Anne’s Mansions in the dusk, and was whirled up in the lift and deposited in front of her own door. She inserted her little latchkey--gilded, but practical...