The Precipice: A Novel

"I don't know when I'll have time for writing again, for I shall be very busy. I suppose I'll think about you more than is good for me. But maybe not. Maybe the thoughts of you...

At the close of the third day a note came from Ray. Her line, he said, had followed him to Lake Forest and he had only then found time to answer it. He was seeing old friends an...

"Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays. I listened to your conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you about all the truth you could find b...

Kate saw David Fulham's deserted family off on the train. Mrs. Hays, the children's nurse, accompanied them. Honora moved with a slow hauteur in her black gown, looking like a d...

"I couldn't have thought of a finer desert than this if I had tried," she went on gayly. "And this wicked saffron glow is precisely the color to throw on it. What a mistake it w...

"You see, I loved David almost from the first--I mean from the beginning of my University work. The first time I saw him crossing the campus he held my attention. There was no o...

"That's one of the reasons why the liquor men combine to kill suffrage," said Ray. "They know it will be a sorry day for them when the women get in. Positively, the women seem t...

They kept insisting to each other that they had no higher intention. They were hilarious over their failures and they persisted in taking even their successes humorously. At fir...

"If we hitched her up to a plough," went on Fulham, not heeding, "we shouldn't be overtaxing her physical strength any more than she overtaxes her mental strength when she tries...

"I hear your father is still living," he wrote. "That is so good! I have no parents now, but I like to remember how happy I was when I had them. I was young when my mother died,...

Kate flung her long body into a Morris chair and prepared to listen. Marna looked about her as if seeking a chair to satisfy her whim, and, finding none, sank upon the floor bef...

"Well, you see, dear lady, suppose that I marry one of the gentlemen of whom you have spoken. Suppose I make a pleasant home for my husband, have two or three nice children, and...

"It's the case of Peggy Dunn," she explained. "Peggy likes life. She has brighter eyes than she knows what to do with and more smiles than she has a chance to distribute. She ha...

He drove well, and he knew the road. It was a dangerous road, which, ever ascending, skirted sharp declivities and rounded buttressed rocks. Kate, prairie-reared, could not "esc...

_A fanfare of trumpets is blowing to which women the world over are listening. They listen even against their wills, and not all of them answer, though all are disturbed. Shut t...

But now, so Kate believed,--so her great instructors informed her,--they were awakening to their privileges. An intenser awareness of life, of the right to expression, and of sa...

She was glad, she said, to be at the Caravansary, quite on a different side of the city from her friends. She made no attempt to renew old acquaintances or to say farewell to he...

"There was to be no fuss and feathers of any sort," he said. "Christmas doesn't represent anything recognized in my philosophy, and you know it. We've had enough of pretense in...

She leaned smilingly across the table as she addressed her father, offering him not the ingratiating and seductive smile which he was accustomed to see women--his wife among the...

She did not see that it was precisely this thing which was winning favor for her. Her lack of self-consciousness, her way of telling people precisely what they wished to know ab...

"It took up the intervals," smiled Marna. "You see, my days are made up of taking care of baby, _and_ of intervals. How fetching that black velvet bodice is, Kate. I didn't know...

"Yes, it's on the side of good," said Honora, who was, after all, like a nun (save that her laboratory had been her cell, and a man's fame her passion), and who therefore brough...

"I am your cousin's emissary, Miss Morrison," she said. "I am Kate Barrington, and I came to greet you because your cousin was unable to get here, and is very, very sorry about...

After a time she went on, and as she mounted, encountering ever a steeper and more difficult way, she tore the leather of her shoes, rent the skirt of her traveling-frock, and r...