The Marbeck Inn: A Novel

|PETER Struggles walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on the counter. There was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he had not stated them for many years....

|ONLY by long service does one become an artist, but one becomes married by a simple ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the most difficult of all the arts, that m...

|SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early hours of the day...

|SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror on his...

|THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a radiance, but he t...

|IN Sam’s opinion, nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, because the corner house had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would not in any case have bought the white el...

|TOM Branstone had drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have averaged ten shillings but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper is a rare bird in Manchester.

|IT might very well have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had not “their silly heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had Anne her self when she retreated t...

|ON general grounds--on the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety--Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and wanted it on...

|ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white satin essent...

|WHEN Anne Branstone set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and it was not her fault if the harvest was not immense. But she did not misdirect her energy; she made certai...

Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had been bored with its routine without...

|EFFIE and Sam knew that they ought to be happy in the weeks which followed, because to be good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they were not happy. Sam, indeed, was less un...

|DEBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in debt they have had more out of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was therefore not...

|THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, of course, be only because his experi...

|SAM had not a dog’s chance of winning the form prize of the Classical Fifth, and knew it. He learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; but the process was slow and his...

|LIFE is still greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and very wonderfully continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the mechanical. It was man, and not nature,...

|THE curse of the Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move perpetually. Not that Sam would have been in any case content to sit idly on a seat in the Council Chamber....

|IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had never thou...

|ANNE called at Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s progress, was still the house which had been the premises of the Hell-fire Club. Anne did not often go the...

|HE had succeeded with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory did not deceive him into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had said, would neither scream nor...

|IF only Ada had had the courage of what ought to have been her convictions, things would have been very different. But she hadn’t the pluck or the zest in life to be anything a...

|IT falls to some to be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their mouths, and the witty have made play with the thought that the wise child chooses rich parents.

|THERE were moments during that night when Sam imagined that he was in the stranglehold of a grand passion: times when he quite successfully deceived himself that he burned for...

|TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in the affair of Madge and George was ba...

|ANNE lived for Sam: and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it appeared sometimes that she lived to make her house the cleanest in the row, that was no more than a sympt...