The Romantic Lady

NOËL ANSON and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years...

"'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met. For life is not a romance, it is a real...

The difference in our years had not prevented an acquaintance ripening into a steady friendship. What I liked about Howard Wentworth was that--unlike so many Englishmen of middl...

"But there was to be no hurry about the affair, Mrs. Richmond had decided from the first; and I could imagine her bustling that decision about her mind, as a sort of anodyne for...

"Thursday came. And then came those other days and nights, and passed! Each one tingling with hope, until half-past ten, and then--oh, it's a misery unlike any other, that waiti...

"Though, mind you, no woman could be blamed for being carried away by the man. That presence of his, that shock of auburn hair, those wild eyes, and that infernally fluent tongu...

"Consuelo hadn't stopped talking during that second or so, for the incident was only a matter of that. We were about two feet apart on the bench. I held my cigar as prominently...

The excuse for the anomaly was in the queer sympathy (and a very conscious one) that Antony always had the power to raise in me; and particularly at that time, when he was so de...

The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state; which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowada...

"You only say that because you think you have a reputation to keep up," he said wearily. "Why on earth shouldn't you be in love with Iris if you want to be? I am."

Roger waved a courtly hand towards Iris to present her. But she made no sign as Antony bowed; the little smile had stayed rigid about her mouth since his entrance, it was as tho...

"That was the first time I realised a new gentleness about him, something I hadn't seen in him even when he had made love to me before we were married. I was very young then, an...

"Almost the first word he said when he came in was, 'Well, that's finished.' But as he said it with almost a smile and quite undramatically I didn't expect, as I 'registered' pl...

"'Perhaps you, and Ronnie too, have thought sometimes that I was rather a beast to and about him--as indeed I was, but not so much a one as I seemed. As the contrast deepened, i...

"But if a God had prophesied so I couldn't have believed him. All the terrors and bogeys he had called up, they faded to nothing before the sudden, active hope that he and I mig...