The Massarenes

His wife looked again with a little more attention at the large figure of a lady, superbly clothed, who sat alone under a tree, and had that desolate air of “not being in it” wh...

The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They were rooms of unusually admirable propo...

Mrs. Massarene had conducted her visitor with great obsequiousness to the head of the staircase, and would have gone down the stairs with her had not Lady Kenilworth prevented s...

Lady Kenilworth was the prettiest woman in England; her family, the Courcys of Faldon, was renowned for physical charms, and she was the loveliest of them all, exactly reproduci...

She colored; she did not like her brother’s rough and blunt ways of putting things, though it was a Courcy habit into which she herself lapsed in cynical and imprudent moments.

“I met the Miser: how has he been to-day? Rating you, eh?” said Lord Brancepeth when he had been ten minutes or more ensconced in the cosiest corner by the boudoir fire. He was...

“By the way,” said the young man, still with his eyes closed, and indisposed to follow his companion’s lead into the domain of sentiment, “I saw the most beautiful woman last ni...

“If you get into a bad set, I tell you frankly I shall never help you out of it. A bad set is a bog; a hopeless bog; you flounder on in it till you sink. Can’t you understand? I...

Some time before Easter cards had been issued for a Costume Ball at Otterbourne House, _temp._ Charles II., to be given immediately after Easter. The Duke occasionally lent the...

A week or two later Hurstmanceaux saw a paragraph in the morning papers which made him throw them hastily aside, leave his breakfast unfinished, and go to his sister’s house in...

A young woman, dressed in white cambric, with the deep shade of a magnolia grove cast upon her as she sat on the marble steps of an Oriental garden, read of these brilliant fest...

In the March and early April of the next year there was very bad weather in England: snow, sleet and storm, killing sheep, starving cattle, delaying railway-trains, and covering...

When she reached Vale Royal, which she did late that night, after a dreary and dangerous drive of fourteen miles, at a walking pace, over frozen roads, she told her parents of t...

The snow was gone, but it was still cold and unpleasant weather when the ruler of Mr. Massarene’s fate, accompanied by a score or more intimate acquaintances who had been persua...

“It’s easy to look _chic_ when one’s got as good a figure as she has,” said one of the other ladies, rather crossly. “She does _look_ like a well-bred person, I admit, but I dar...

There was an old friend of his mother to whom Hurstmanceaux was much attached, a Mrs. Raby of Bedlowes, with whom he invariably spent a few days at Whitsuntide. Bedlowes was a r...

In the autumn of the year the general election took place, and Southwoldshire returned William Massarene, whilst Limehouse selected a labor member to represent its interests. Hi...

The giddy months frolicked away like youths and maidens dancing on a golden ground on one of Povis de Chavanne’s friezes. Flirting, laughing, gaming, waltzing, shooting, hunting...

It was another wet and chilly Easter in another year, and the town had just begun to fill after the recess, when one morning after luncheon the good Duke of Otterbourne, as his...

In another week he also was carried out under the big yews and the Chantrey and Roubiliac statues, and laid beside the remains of his father and forefathers in a black-velvet co...

“Poor papa is deaded,” said Jack to Boo on his return to town; in the tenderness of his heart he was beginning to forget the dead man’s pinches and to pity his retirement from t...

She remained in London May and June. Of course it was deadly dull, but people came to dine with her; she could dine with her very intimate friends; and men were in and out all d...

When she had ended her repast with two hothouse nectarines, her brother was announced, to her great vexation. She never saw Ronnie very willingly and now less willing than ever,...

“Oh, my lord,” said Mason with a respectful little gesture which implied that persons like himself were always in demand at all seasons, and that the loss would be her Grace’s,...

She had never known great anxiety before. She had had many worries, many troublesome moments, when she wanted money, but never such a weight of care as this. There had always be...

On the morrow, at the appointed hour, the real Otterbourne jewels were consigned to the representatives of the Otterbourne bankers, and Hurstmanceaux, like all kind-hearted pers...

Brancepeth, like Hurstmanceaux, was sincerely unhappy through her, for a woman whom men love much, despite her faults and caprices, has an almost unlimited power of worrying and...

Katherine Massarene noticed that her father paired early in the season and was ordered by his physician to take the waters of Ems. But she made no remark on the fact, and her mo...

With the next season he allowed her to accept the loan of her sister Carrie’s house in town; that lady having gone on a little trip to Japan. She hated the Wisbeach house, which...

One afternoon there landed from an American liner, at a Liverpool wharf, a tall, bony, haggard-looking man, roughly and shabbily dressed, with a long, tangled, grey beard, and d...

Katherine Massarene was coming down the staircase under the smiling gaze of Clodion’s falconer, dressed for the evening and about to dine out, when she heard the shot, muffled a...

Katherine could not oppose her wishes, alien as they were to her own tastes and desires. She felt that the wish would have been also her father’s. The tragic suddenness of his e...

There was no one in London of the world which had been William Massarene’s highest heaven. The August sun shone on the flower-beds of the parks in all their glory, and the poor...

In the month of August Lord Roxhall, who was at Arcachon with his wife, ostensibly for health, in reality to cut short the expenses of a season in town, received amongst his cor...

At the head of a Norwegian fjord, where the tents of a gay and aristocratic party of travellers had been pitched on the green sward for a merry month or two of fishing and shoot...

Katherine Massarene was as unhappy as it is possible for a person to be who has no personal crime on their conscience, and has all their personal wants supplied. She was incessa...

With the following March London saw once more the Duchess of Otterbourne carrying her graceful presence to Court and salon and theatre, having recovered her beauty and with it h...

When Jack entered his mother’s house that afternoon he looked as if he had left boyhood behind him for ever. His face was drawn and pinched, his eyes were swollen with weeping,...

“We are here,” wrote Boo to her eldest brother half a year later. “It’s quite hot: one wants summer frocks. There are no end of Germans and Russes to play with; but I don’t like...

Prince Khris of Karstein was at Monte Carlo playing continuously, losing almost always, living in a miserable lodging over a small shop, and devoting, to that blind goddess with...

“Lord! my dear Ronnie,” exclaimed Daddy Gwyllian, “what poor short-sighted creatures we are with all our worldly wisdom! To think that I ever advised you to do such a thing! Lor...

About two weeks from the time of the unwelcome visit to her of Prince Khris, the Duchess of Otterbourne, descending the terrace steps of her hotel, met, as he ascended them, you...

When she reached the hotel, everyone was already gone to the concert at the Casino; it was Thursday night; she got to her own rooms unperceived, and told her maid that she had l...

Two days later Olga zu Lynar was seated by her fireside in the home of her choice in the Swabian Alb, where the March day had none of the sunlight and fragrance of Monte Carlo....

“I’ll marry you, Wuffie,” said Mouse, three days later as she walked along a secluded alley of the Casino gardens, whilst the sun sparkled on marble balustrades and glossy orang...

In the following autumn Margaret Massarene caught cold. It was a slight ailment at first, and if she had been the woman she had been in North Dakota she would have soon thrown o...

It was a gusty, wild, and cloudy morning at Faldon some days later, and Hurstmanceaux sat in his library reading a communication which he had received from the head of the Gover...

The château of Les Mouettes was lent for the coming winter season to the Prince and Princess Woffram of Karstein by its owners, who, both naturally generous, and made more gener...