The pelicans

“The solid accomplishment of Miss Delafield’s three novels establishes her as a figure of actual literary importance. Writing, from her first published sentence to the ending ph...

“Oh, you know what children are! They’ve practically ‘got over’ it as people say, already, but there’s bound to be an outburst, I’m afraid, at the ‘last evening’--you know the k...

“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis, how can you? Of course I have. I’ve tried to see to everything, though of course no one could take your place. I needn’t tell you that.”

“Oh, he writes from time to time--poor boy. You know--the kind of letters that tell one nothing. It’s so curious that so many many others should come to one for help or sympathy...

She was sitting, very still, just outside the circle of light cast by the great standard lamp. Morris had already noticed her capacity for extreme stillness, oddly at variance w...

“You’ll walk back with me,” he said hurriedly to Rosamund, and read her answer in her eyes, before turning back with discontent in his own, to where Bertha Tregaskis awaited him.

“Yes, dearest, of course,” tenderly replied Nina, but she refrained from telling him the only piece of news which transpired during the next few days: that Frances was not well...

After the formal consent given by Frederick Tregaskis, there had been no further discussions between Sir Guy and Mrs. Tregaskis. She accepted her defeat with the sort of grim ga...

“After all, the best way to get the whole thing out of her head is to treat it as a matter of course. A persecution would only make her more determined to be a little martyr--Fr...

“Oh, my dear child, it was all about some garden seats that the Prior ordered for the grounds of their house at Twickenham--for visitors, you know, because they naturally have n...

Ludovic, with some perspicacity, divined that Mrs. Severing supposed her fragment of Latinity to be some recondite version of “_sanctum sanctorum_,” and tried to look proportion...

“And I can’t tell you, my dear boy, what a relief it is to me after all the correspondence there has been with dear Bertie, and Father Anselm, and the poor child herself, who ne...

A little table in the window was laden with books grouped at the foot of an immense crucifix, devotional pictures, and slender brackets on which were balanced perilously-poised...

“I don’t know whether I ought to leave Frances, but”--Nina pressed her hand to her brow for a moment--“if you want me to come home, darling, I would leave it all in a moment, th...

“Ma-me-laid, as the chicken said,” lugubriously and quite absent-mindedly remarked Miss Blandflower, neither she nor anyone else paying the slightest heed to the historic jest,...

“A most unjustifiable piece of interference on the part of this person,” said Mrs. Tregaskis, in no uncertain accents. “She appears to think herself called upon to give me advic...

It was to Rosamund that she could best pour out the story of her new experiences, and the fullness of Rosamund’s sympathy gave no hint of any sense of exclusion.

Rosamund, with the same despairing instinct of rebellion and impotent protection that had been hers in the days when she had resisted Bertha Tregaskis’ kindness to the little or...

From the stall where the novice-mistress knelt, invariably upright, her wide-open gaze fixed upon the High Altar, came the slow unemphatic announcements of the Points of Meditat...

All letters to or from the members of the novitiate were, of course, examined by the novice-mistress, as were those of the professed nuns by the Superior. Nor was this censorshi...

The little procession of acolytes, preceding the tall tonsured figure of the Prior of Twickenham, came into the Sanctuary, and Frances sank upon her knees on the red velvet cush...

Nevertheless, Rosamund clung passionately to those assertions, both then and on her return to Porthlew. They seemed in some strange, inadequate way, to protect her from Bertha’s...

“However that may be,” he said tolerantly, and disregarded Nina’s interpolated: “I’ve just told you how it is----” “However that may be, mother, if you really want to go down th...

If she died it would be all over. Over for Frances, the long separation that the years would widen between her and Rosamund; over, the aching sense of home-sickness that surely...

At all events, there was more sense of blankness than of acute bitterness in her farewell to the cottage. The renunciation, if renunciation there was, remained strangely devoid...

“Your mother told me once that she rather wondered if the whole thing would end in Rosamund’s becoming a Roman Catholic, too. She made friends with a woman at Francie’s convent....

“Ludovic, I’ll try and explain,” said Rosamund, speaking with difficulty, and using his name for the first time. “It has seemed to me that there is only one way for anyone to le...