Category: Romance

The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident

It was in Gramercy Park. As you may or may not know, Gramercy Park is the least noisy spot in the metropolitan Bedlam. Without being unreasonably aristocratic it is sedate and what agents call exclusive.

Chapters

20. CHAPTER IX

Tumultuously the session was resumed. At the door was a riot. There a squad of police fought back surging nondescripts clamoring for admission, fighting for entrance to the cont...

17. CHAPTER VII

The theories and clues in the now celebrated case Orr related to Sylvia one after another as they reached him through different channels. To the story of Marie Leroy she listene...

12. CHAPTER II

A philosopher has noted that at certain periods a great many stupid people have a good deal of stupid money. This condition, describable as plethora, is succeeded by another cat...

9. CHAPTER IX

It was still as fine as powder. To have found elbow room there a few days previous you would have had to go out to sea. Now, in and on it children were making hillocks and holes...

3. CHAPTER III

Loftus, letting himself into a hansom, sailed away. At Morris Park that afternoon there were to be races, and up the maelstrom of Fifth avenue came scudding motors, fleeting traps.

2. CHAPTER II

Irving Place is south of Gramercy Park. To the west are the multiple atrocities of Union Square, to the east are the nameless shames of Third avenue. Between the two Irving Plac...

5. CHAPTER V

Gay Street knew Marie no more. Twenty-second street made her acquaintance. There, in the Arundel, an apartment house which is just around the corner from Gramercy Park, Loftus s...

14. CHAPTER IV

In Fanny's drawing-room the next evening, at six minutes after eight, Loftus appeared. Although tolerably punctual, others had preceded him. On a sofa with Fanny was Sylvia Wald...

13. CHAPTER III

In her sitting-room at the Arundel Marie sat. It was nearly midnight. Hours before she had dined. Since then she had wandered from one room to another, from one chair to another...

11. CHAPTER I

Marie's voice rang out, clear and fluid, scattering notes through the room, filling it with them, charging the air with melody, then, like a chorus entering a crypt, it sank in...

16. CHAPTER VI

There are occasions when speech is an intrusion and sympathy an affront. An occasion of this kind coincided with Fanny's exit. On the mantel the clock still ticked. Otherwise th...

1. CHAPTER I

It was in Gramercy Park. As you may or may not know, Gramercy Park is the least noisy spot in the metropolitan Bedlam. Without being unreasonably aristocratic it is sedate and w...

15. CHAPTER V

Orr was leaving his office. It was four o'clock. He was on his way home. But the name detained him. Murder in Gramercy Park was a novelty which no one aware of its sedateness co...

8. CHAPTER VIII

A fortnight had gone, two weeks of dressing and undressing, of dinners, dances and dips; a succession of mellow mornings; long, green afternoons, dusks stabbed by sudden stars a...

7. CHAPTER VII

What Sylvia replied to Orr's communication, whether indeed she replied at all, Annandale was not informed. He himself wrote to her. The letter was long; it was also abject. But...

18. CHAPTER VIII

"Hear ye, hear ye, all ye having business with the Court of the General Sessions of the City and County of New York, draw near, give attention and ye shall be heard."

6. CHAPTER VI

At noon the next day Annandale was not awake nor was he asleep. Through spaces in which memories met, entangled and sank, he was groping in search of himself. In these spaces th...

4. CHAPTER IV

Sailing in the hansom down Fifth avenue, Loftus thought of that first interview with the girl, of the den in which it had occurred and of his subsequent visits there. Since the...

10. CHAPTER X

Sylvia had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest had so deepened that she gave him he...

21. CHAPTER X

In the days of the Doges there was a Gold Book in which the First Families of Venice shone. In New York there is also a Gold Book, unprinted but otherwise familiar. The names th...

19. livid. Had the fluted columns with their fabulous beasts fallen on him

he could not have been more limp. At one question he swayed like an animal hit on the head. At another he hissed like a snake. There were times when he tried to hide from view....