The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne : a Novel

Something has happened. Something fantastic, inconceivable. I am in a condition to be surprised at nothing. If a witch on a broomstick rode in through my open window and lecture...

I knew something would happen. Messer Diavolo does not ride whooping to no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires to torment; nor does he inspire photographs for nothi...

_Campsie, N.B._ Hither have I fled from my buccaneering relations. I am seeking shelter in a manse in the midst of a Scotch moor, and the village, half a mile away, is itself fi...

She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never before occurred to me in Judith’s establishment, and presently returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the...

I lunched at home, and read drowsily before the open window till four o’clock. Then the splendour of the day invited me forth. Whither should I go? I thought of Judith and Hamps...

_Etretat, Seine-Injerieure_:--A young fellow on the Casino terrace this evening caught my eye, looked at me queerly, and passed on. His face, though unfamiliar, stirred some dor...

For reasons which will be given later, I sit down here, in Verona, to write the history of my extravagant adventure. I shall formulate and expand the rough notes in my diary whi...

It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the Pinacoteca of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering countenance of Morone’s _Miseratrix Virginum Regin...

I wrote Judith a long letter last night, urging her to disregard the forfeited claims of her husband and to join her life definitely with mine. I was cynical enough to feel that...

Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette, forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The e...

I wonder whether I should be happier now if I had lived in a garret “in the brave days when I was twenty-one,” if I had undergone the lessons of misery with the attendant compen...

It was only too horribly obvious. Any man but myself would have kept her under lock and key and established a guard round the house. Any man but myself would have never let her...

Judith and I have had our day in the country. We know a wayside station, on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half from town, where we can alight, find eggs and bac...

All day long I felt like a respectable person about to be brought before a magistrate for being drunk and disorderly. Now I have the uneasy satisfaction of having been let off w...

Something is wrong with Antoinette. The dinner she served up this evening was all but uneatable. Something is wrong with Stenson, who has taken to playing his lugubrious hymn-tu...

Shall I be accused of harbouring a bevy of odalisques at No. 20 Lingfield Terrace? Calumny and Exaggeration walk abroad, arm in arm, even on the north side of Regent’s Park. If...

Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly since that day.

I answered Judith’s letter. After the long silence it seemed, at first, strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening my heart as I had never done before to man or wo...

“Do not laugh at me,” she writes. “The road to Paris is paved with good intentions. I really could not help it. Delphine put her great arm round my would-be sequestered and medi...

At Paddington I came upon Sebastian Pasquale lounging about the arrival platform. As I had not seen or heard of him since the end of July I had concluded that he was wandering a...

I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love. The love that is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages, is of the brute nature and is doomed to perish....

I do not like living. It is thoroughly disagreeable. Today Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery th...

I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been...

The death of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from t...

I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing appearance. For the oddity I care not two pins. _Io son...