The Man Who Found Himself (Uncle Simon)

On the morning of the fourth of June, the same morning on which Simon had broken like a butterfly from his chrysalis of long-moulded custom and stiff routine, Mr. Bobby Ravensha...

He dined at a little club he patronised in a street off St. James's Street, met a friend named Foulkes, and adjourned to the Alhambra, Foulkes insisting on doing all the paying.

He entered and looked around. A good many people were breakfasting in the big room, the ordinary English breakfast crowd at a big hotel; family parties, lone men and lone women,...

Now, Moxon had come up that morning from Framlingham in Kent, where he was taking a holiday, to transact some business. Amongst other things he had to see Simon Pettigrew on a q...

The head of a big office or business house cannot move out of his orbit without creating perturbations. Brownlow, the head clerk and second in command of the Pettigrew business,...

Madame Rossignol was a charming old lady of sixty, a production of France--no other country could have produced her. She lived in Duke Street, Leicester Square, supporting herse...

One of the pleasantest, yet perhaps most dangerous, points about Simon Pettigrew's condition was his un-English open-heartedness towards strangers--strangers that pleased him. A...

Mudd, with the ten-pound note and the written address, had started that morning with the intention of doing another errand as well. He first took a cab to King Charles Street. I...

"Well, sir," said Mudd, "I was in there myself in the parlour, having a drop of hot water and gin with a bit of lemon in it. It's a decent house, and the servants' room in this...

A flower-woman and her wares caught his eye; he bought a bunch of late violets and, with his hat tilted back, dived in his trousers' pocket and produced a handful of silver. He...

Upton-On-Hill stands on a hogback of land running north and south, timbered with pines mostly, and commanding a view of half Wessex, not the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, however. You...

"You are all absolutely wrong." Julia Delyse was speaking. She had been sitting mumchance at a general meeting of the Pettigrew confraternity held half an hour before Bench in a...

Bobby thought that he could trace a lot of things in the porter's tone and manner, a respect and commiseration for Mr. Mudd and perhaps not quite such a high respect for himself...

Oppenshaw was one of those men who carry conviction. You will have noticed in life that quite a lot of people don't convince; they may be good, they may be earnest, but they don...

Mudd was Simon's factotum, butler, and minister of inferior affairs. Mudd was sixty-five and a bit; he had been in the services of the Pettigrew family forty-five years, and had...

Now Simon, spendthrift in front of pleasure and heedless of money as the wind, in front of Mudd seemed cautious and a bit suspicious. It was as though his subliminal mind recogn...

"Am I? See here, Higgs. Yesterday morning I met old Mr. Simon Pettigrew, the lawyer; mind, you are to say nothing about this to anyone--but stay a moment, go into the sitting-ro...

Julia, with her hair down, in an eau-de-Nil morning wrapper, and frying bacon over a Duplex oilstove, was not lovely--though, indeed, few of us are lovely in the early morning....

It was a cross between a hansom cab and a "growler," with the voice of the latter, and the dust of the Farnborough road, with the prospect of a three-mile drive to meet Julia an...

Just as rabbit-burrows on the Arizona plain give shelter to a mixed tenantry, a rabbit, an owl, and a snake often occupying the same hole, so the Harley Street houses are, as a...

Simon had been that day all alone to see Mrs. Fisher-Fisher's roses; he said so at dinner that night. He had remembered the general invitation and had taken it, evidently, as a...

"When I came to," said Simon, speaking almost with his teeth set, "I was like a person stunned. Then I remembered, bit by bit, what I had been doing, but it was like vaguely rem...

"Colonel Salmon's river, he and a man, and the man's got off. He's at the policeman's house, and he says he'll let us have him if we'll go bail for him, seeing he's an old gentl...

"Well, I can't say for certain, for the disease, or the ailment, if you like the term better, has not been long enough before the eyes of science to make quite definite statemen...

If Sir Ralph had kicked him out of the Athenæum for airing false science there he would have enjoyed it. He would have enjoyed anything casting odium and discredit on the theory...

King Charles Street lies in Westminster; you turn a corner and find yourself in Charles Street as one might turn a corner and find oneself in History. The cheap, the nasty, and...

We must go back to three o'clock. At three o'clock Bobby, walking in the garden smoking a cigarette, had crossed the front of the arbour--Arbour No. 1. The grass path, soundless...

He awoke to Mudd drawing the blinds and to another perfect day--a summer morning, luxurious and warm, beautiful even in London. He had lost clutch of Tidd and Renshaw in the lan...

At four o'clock that day a carriage drove up to the hotel and two gentlemen alighted. They were shown into the coffee-room and Mudd was sent for. He came, expecting to find poli...