The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

I close my door, but not upon the bills. These keep pouring in with the insistent buzzing of a swarm of hornets, and every day I see them with a more helpless dismay. I figure a...

I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen, powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk hou...

Nothing can come of it but misery and wretchedness for me. By no word or sign dare I convey such a thing to her or to any one else--to no one except these pale pages that receiv...

Automatically, without any premeditation that I can now recall, I gazed into my own room like a prowling thief. The picture I saw riveted me to the spot with an irresistible mag...

"What happened? Your sister's orphans come to you. You plunge into life, go into business which you detest, lose your money, go to work as a clerk, by George! You of all people!...

What I had long fitfully suspected was how somewhat darkly apparent: In some manner Alicia was endeavoring to stand between the boy and evil, shame, disgrace, sacrificing hersel...

This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an old castle, I showed them through the r...

"Schools, Ranny dear, schools," she impatiently answered. "There are homelike places run by splendid women--just made for such cases. Why, even the little one--Jimmie, is it?--H...

Randolph and the gawky boy fell at once to tossing a baseball, Jimmie rolled delightedly about the lush grass, still grappling with his insoluble problem of rolling up a slope a...

"Value it!" I cried, as my fingers caressed it. "Why, certainly I value it. It is a perfectly genuine Elzevir--the great Louis himself printed this at Leyden. It is not what you...

"No, Griselda, I'll not. Good clothes have never yet ruined anybody," I gave her as my genuine conviction. "It's the other way about. It's poor clothes eat at the vitals of your...

Are there any women today, I wonder, like the girl wife of Jacopone da Todi, who are found in the midst of worldly brilliance wearing the hair shirt of piety and devotion over t...

"Don't talk rot," flared Gertrude in an exasperation which I still deplore, for the steely glitter in her eyes was not pleasant. "I am not going to make myself ridiculous by mar...

A breath of the wide world has come to me with that pleasant burly note, of other-worldliness, of freedom, of rovings and wanderings, something of the zest I used to feel. I use...

"Yes, I know, Uncle Ranny--a policeman! What does a policeman know about girls like Alicia? I--we talked a lot, she and I," he stammered. "I have a hunch I could sort of tell wh...

I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and the boy. With a leaden heart I must...

She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly,...

"Bright things," she murmured pensively; "everything that has happened to me since I came to you has been bright, and everything soul-stirring. That's what makes it so hard, Unc...

"Do you know what you are, Alicia?" I stood over her, puffing and chattering against time, "You are an old-fashioned girl, that's what you are--with emotions and--and all sorts...

"Oh, then you've never been married at all!" Gina exulted, and she energetically read the cards for me afresh. Her sortilege evidently is not a perfect science. But it occurs to...

"So there is no use worrying about that. But you mean the money," and her face clouded anxiously. "But I know what I'll do, Uncle Ranny," she came gliding toward me. "There is a...

A great tenderness for the boy stabbed at my heart. I longed to comfort him as I could comfort Laura or Jimmie. Was he not their brother and as much as they my child? Like a dis...