The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore: A Farcical Novel

No. 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, was no exception to the rule. Its inmates were chiefly women, the widows and daughters of professional men. A few childless marri...

Early next morning Prudence carefully locked all the doors of her own room and of her sister’s apartment and went round to the stationer’s to see if a letter had come for her fr...

That evening there was a mysterious private gathering of ladies in Mrs. Dumaresq’s room, chosen because it was the largest. To it came first of all the medical woman, bursting w...

Miss Prudence Semaphore, in after years describing her sensations when placed in the witness box, was accustomed to say she didn’t know whether she stood on her head or her heel...

Boarding-house life tends to make one selfish; “each for himself and God for us all,” is the boarders’ motto. Where people come and go, drifting in and out like weeds upon the t...

Next morning Prudence, after a restless night, was up betimes. Never in the past had the placid, good-natured spinster known sleeplessness, except in a very modified form. Since...

The gong at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, thundered under the vigorous strokes of the bow-legged German waiter. By one, by two, by three, the boarders trooped down...

The two following days passed peacefully over. Prudence told her carefully-concocted story to Mrs. Wilcox, and said she would probably follow her sister in a fortnight. She desp...

Miss Prudence Semaphore slept placidly. It was her nature to do everything as placidly as possible. Nightmares rarely visited her. When Miss Augusta was crosser than usual, or t...

No. 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, was in a ferment of excitement. Something had happened. The boarders did not quite know what, but there was in the air that elect...

When Prudence found herself in the street, she looked in a bewildered fashion from right to left, not knowing which way to turn. The good-natured young constable pointed out the...

Never did a placid, good-natured woman, habitually truthful, unaccustomed to all save the shallowest of plots, unused to taking the initiative, and indeed, preferring to depend...

They were seated at breakfast two or three mornings later, and the medical lady’s statement was interrupted by the entrance of Miss Semaphore, who glided quietly to her place, a...

With ill-concealed impatience did Miss Semaphore await her usual hour for retiring. With a sense of agreeable expectancy did she at last seat herself in her room before the look...

Nervous people are generally too early, and on the fatal Monday morning Miss Prudence Semaphore, who was still weak and ill, but meantime had found comparative repose in her qui...

Miss Prudence did not appear at afternoon tea, so the symptoms of her sister, her refusal, or, at least, disinclination to call in a doctor, her extraordinary confusion and cont...

Prudence was very much surprised and delighted, being in one of her rare spasms of remembrance that she no longer was a girl. She expressed herself as not only willing but ready...

With no little diffidence did Miss Prudence Semaphore, a woman quite unused to the ways and wants of babies, present herself at the special counter in Whiteley’s devoted to thei...

She noted the frown on the brow of Mrs. Wilcox and the hardness of her tone when she asked her how she felt, and if she thought she would be able to sit up for a while to-morrow...

Usually the fond imaginations of the night wear a different aspect in the dawn; but the visions of the Misses Semaphore had lost none of their attractiveness by morning. Though,...

The next thing Miss Prudence felt she should do was to see Mrs. Wilcox and prepare her for hearing at any time that Augusta had left suddenly. Mrs. Wilcox sat in the little room...

Of our story little remains to tell. Augusta was driven to her sister’s lodgings and put to bed. In less than twenty-four hours she had arrived once more at the time of life she...

When dinner was over, and the feminine boarders had filed upstairs as usual, a fresh shock awaited poor Prudence. There was sudden great excitement in the street. A dozen newsbo...