The noise of the world

"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but,...

The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in p...

Belle Mitchell was much taller than Anne or Hilda, with straight, very heavy brown hair and brown eyes. She had a jolly, even disposition, was rarely hurt herself, never knew wh...

For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law. At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need...

"I'm not joking. Listen." He drew her to a doorway from the hurrying stream. "Don't, dear, please. I don't like to think of you tied down in an office, and anyhow it's not worth...

Roger crumbled his bread on the cloth and waited. Anne tried to go on calmly with her lunch, but she felt her face flushing and she knew Roger was watching her, his eyes growing...

The next afternoon while Anne packed her trunk, her mother kept wandering to the door and gazing in the puzzled excitement of a child who encounters something pleasant, but so e...

In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers cl...

It was a few weeks after the Mitchell dinner that Roger came back to the office one afternoon to find Hilary Wainwright pacing up and down in a frank perplexity that he did not...

For several weeks after Roger's outburst, Anne sensed a new element in her life, as if she had come face to face with something hidden before. This element was a quality in Roge...

After days of tentative discussion, Hilary Wainwright decided on Christmas Eve to have a Christmas tree at his office for the children of the striking stevedores who loaded his...

They did not mention the dinner again, but for weeks it hung in the background of all Anne's thought. The long silences and sudden irritations of Roger she interpreted by it, as...

The next morning Roger reached the office at half past nine but Hilary was already there. It was the first morning of a clear sunshine after weeks of rain, and Hilary, even more...

There were times in the next month when Roger seriously considered going back into the law. He even went so far as looking up Walter Marsh, an old college chum with whom he had...

The next day Roger went to Tom O'Connell. Through a cloud of tobacco smoke, Roger saw him at the end of the dusty loft, sprawled on the edge of a table behind a low railing and...

Through the next three months Anne thought more about money than she had ever thought in her life before. During the Wainwright days she had often been able to save ten dollars...

In July the baby was born. Anne was very ill and Hilda fluttered about looking reproachfully at Roger. But, with the least impatience of Roger toward her, she propitiated him wi...

For a week the tension between Roger and Anne lasted, pulling a little weaker each day under the pressure of proximity, little Rogie, and the habit of agreement. Anne did not me...

It was a windy March afternoon when Anne, having secured the services of Mrs. Horton's oldest daughter to look after Rogie while she did some necessary shopping, came face to fa...

The days passed. Roger did not mention Merle. He was often at the office now in the evening and Anne knew he and Tom were working harder than ever. Some Hindoo revolutionists ha...

Now that she had definitely come among them, joined her interest with Roger's, Anne tried to shake off the feeling that had held her in the past when she waited for Roger, and t...

So the weeks passed until one afternoon in early August, when James Mitchell was taken suddenly ill and Hilda sent for Anne. She found her mother sitting in the kitchen, crying...

The days went by neither slowly nor quickly, but with a terrible fixity of sameness. The routine of illness, once established, life adjusted itself to nourishment at certain hou...

At the end of three weeks, Roger wrote his first real letter. He was going on to the Pennsylvania coal fields, then to New York, the West Virginia mining country, the southern c...

Hour after hour, day after day, the train raced on, away from the smoke-wrapped slums of great cities, from great stretches of the earth torn open for men's greed, from the mill...

The next day Anne went home and the following Monday was back in the loft. A long period of stagnant waiting had ended in a new burst of hope and the place vibrated with the rus...

Winter came, a dry winter of cool mornings and nights, and days of clear sunshine. Against this sparkling background, Anne and Roger moved side by side in almost total silence....

Spiritual freedom. He wished for no other. The man in the street might talk as if sex were a devouring hunger, a ravening wolf ready to spring upon one unexpectedly at any momen...

The next morning Roger went before Anne awoke. In the afternoon a messenger brought a note asking to have his things sent to the office. At dusk the express came and Anne watche...

Roger received Belle's note telling him that Anne had left town and asking him to make some arrangement about the cottage in the same mail that he received the legal notice of A...

Day after day Anne sat at rest in the vast silence. Far back in space and time she had waved a last good-bye up the black funnel of the staircase to Hilda, holding Rogie, for, i...

She let herself into the flat and went noiselessly up the stairs to the hall. In the front room her father was talking to Rogie. She could not catch the words but she heard the...

On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but the surroundings were so different...

Roger was in Los Angeles on a speaking trip when Anne's letter was forwarded to him from the office. He found it when he came back from one of the most successful meetings he ha...