The pretender: A story of the Latin Quarter

With this reflexion I let myself collapse into a padded chair of transcendent comfort, lit a cigarette and inspected once more the amazing bank-book. Since I had seen it last se...

Whether or not a sense of humour is an attribute of the Divine, I am too ignorant of theology to conjecture; but I am sure that as a sustaining power amid the tribulations of li...

I was awakened at eight o’clock by the alarm in my watch, and lay a few minutes debating whether or not I should rise. I have always rebelled against the convention that makes u...

To believe a woman who tells you her age is twenty-nine is to show a naïve confidence in her veracity. Twenty-nine is an almost impossible age. No woman is twenty-nine for more...

If ever I should come to write my autobiography (as I fondly hope in the fulness of time my recognition as the American Dumas will justify me in doing) it will fall easily into...

_Chapter VI._--Manhood. At age of twenty-one wrote _The Haunted Taxicab_, and scored immediate success.--Devouring ambition to write the Great American Novel.--Published nine mo...

Who would have dreamed it? But in the great round-up of matrimony, isn’t it always the unexpected that happens? I was run down, roped, thrown, before I knew what was happening t...

The disadvantage of persistent globe-trotting is that it makes the world so deplorably provincial. With familiarity the glamour of the far and strange is swept away, till at las...

After a hard skirmish with the catalogue of the Reading-Room, which, with reference and counter-reference, defied me stubbornly, yet finally yielded to my assault, I found mysel...

Allured by a sign: “A Cut off the Joint for Sixpence,” I lunched in a little eating-house off Tottenham Court Road. I was at the tapioca pudding stage of the repast, and in a mo...

Again I was struck with her foreign intonation, her pretty precision with which Frenchwomen speak English, the deliberate utterance due to an effort, not wholly successful, to a...

As far as the actual ceremony went it seemed as if I were the person least concerned. One, James Horace Madden, was tying himself in the most awkward manner to a member of the o...

In the morning Anastasia always has her _ménage_ to do. She sweeps till the parquet is like a mirror, and dusts till not a speck can you find from floor to ceiling. No priest co...

“Yes, it’s not good form to say those words in English; just as you tell me in France in polite society one never refers to a thousand sacred pigs. Profanity is to some extent a...

The last few weeks have passed so swiftly I scarce can credit it. In the mornings my vitalising walks; in the afternoons my lapidary work in prose. I have begun a series of arti...

Now the Crystal Palace is one of these traps for the stranger with which Paris is baited. Your Parisian knows these places as part of the city’s life which is not there for the...

“Oh, several. I don’t just remember how many. I quarrelled with one because we couldn’t agree over the name we would give the first baby. I broke it off with another because her...

This morning in the course of my walk I saw a hungry child trying to sell violets, a girl gazing fearfully at the Maternity Hospital, an old woman picking, as if they were gold,...

The partner who managed the forwarding department of the firm of Madden & Company reported to the partner who represented its manufacturing end that the editor of the _Babbler_...

I ascribed Anastasia’s fainting spell to the somewhat sketchy meals we had been having; so for the next few weeks I fed her up anxiously. That same evening we held a special mee...

The time was drawing near when I would become a father. Yet as the hour of my trial approached I realised that I was glad, glad. I hoped it would be a girl; nay, I was sure it w...

“Are we not all of us just a little mad? Would you have us entirely sane? What a humdrum world that would be! I hate people who are so egregiously sane.”

The past month has been the hardest we have yet experienced. After paying the rent we had about fifty francs to keep the house going. Not that it mattered much; for we both had...

Wonderingly I signed for it. The man lingered, but I had no offering for the great god _Pourboire_. I regarded the letter curiously. It was from MacWaddy & Wedge, the last peopl...

It is Little Thing singing as she sits by the poppy patch before the door. There are hundreds of poppies. They dance in gleeful glory and their scarlet is so luminous it seems a...

“It’s terrible! It’s unspeakable!” I groaned, on arising next morning, as I thought of the events of the night before. “That poor girl, so good, so sweet! And to think that she...

I was killing my chief priest in a blaze of glory when Anastasia invaded the room that between meals is called my bureau, at meals the _salle-à-manger_, in the evening the _salon_.

Madame Séraphine had spoiled my plan of a triple marriage, but there was nothing to prevent a double one. It took place one midsummer morning in the Mairie, rue Grenelle. On the...

“Can’t say as there is,” said the fat man thoughtfully. “But wait; yes, by the blasting blazes, there’s the skirt wot put my show on the blink. I’d give a month in chokey to get...

One morning I received a cheque for nine hundred dollars from Widgeon & Co.--payment for _The Great Quietus_, now running serially in the _Uplift_. Did I wave it in the air? Did...

I was lucky in getting a state-room on the _Garguantuan_, and on reading over the list of passengers I saw a name that seemed vaguely familiar, Miss B. Tevandale. Where had I he...