The Second Fiddle

On the whole, Stella preferred the Cottage Dairy Company to the People's Restaurant. It was a shade more expensive, but if you ate less and liked it more, that was your own affa...

The curtain lifted, and civilization swung back. They were in Russia in the twelfth century--or any other time. It hardly mattered when; the music was the perpetual music of the...

The Warings had reached Redcliffe Square as accidentally as a tramp takes shelter under a hedge. Professor Waring, whose instinct was to burrow like a mole, blind and silent, in...

Do come Sunday to tea. Mama is out of town, and I must have some support. Julian is going to bring his mother to see me for the first time. I believe she's rather alarming--awfu...

It was a very hot morning in July, a morning when work begins slowly, continues irritably, and is likely to incite human paroxysms of forgetfulness and temper. It took the form...

When anything happened, Julian's first instinct was to happen with it. He had never been in the rear of a situation in his life. The blow of the Austrian ultimatum reached him o...

Julian had spent thirty-two years--his mother included his first--in seeing what he wanted to do and doing it. He had never consulted anybody else, because he had always seen hi...

Amberley hung upon a cliff of land above the water meadows. Rising high behind it, fold on fold, were the Sussex Downs, without lines, without rigidity, as soft as drifting snow.

Julian walked easily and swiftly up the slopes of the downs, whistling as he went. He knew the point from which he would be sure to see his flying nymph. The air was full of the...

It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war. Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then suddenly out of them flashed the t...

It is disconcerting to believe that you are the possessor of one kind of temper--a cold, deadly, on-the-spot temper--which cuts through the insignificant flurries of other peopl...

Stella had always known that it would come; she had spent two months far-seeing it. It had usually taken the form of a telegram falling out of Mrs. Waring's wool, or Eurydice st...

Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long time. It was while he was lying out un...

It was not often that Stella took anything for herself, least of all Saturday afternoons. They belonged by a kind of sacred right to Eurydice, and what was left over from Eurydi...

After the arrival of Eurydice, Mr. Travers saw very little of Stella. At certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in some mysterious manner she seemed t...

There are two winds in March; one comes in like a tight-lipped school-master set on punishment. It is frequently accompanied by dust, sunshine, and influenza. It has all the col...

Lady Verny and Julian were sitting in the hall when Stella joined them. It wasn't in the least terrible meeting Julian; he had reduced his physical disabilities to the minimum o...

It's the strangest household, or else, perhaps, everybody else's is. You never see anybody doing anything, and yet everything gets done. It's all ease and velvet and bells; and...

It was a hard, shivering March morning. Next to the bed upon which Lady Verny was working was a sheet of snowdrops under a dark yew-hedge. They trembled and shook in the light a...

Lady Verny finished her weeding. It took her an hour and a half to do what she wanted to the bed; then she rose from her cramped position, and went into Julian's library by one...

Stella found that there were several Julians. The first one she knew quite well; he only wanted to be left alone. She dealt quite simply with him, as if he were Mr. Travers befo...

It is always hard to return in the character of a captive to a scene in which you have played the part of victor, and Julian had told the truth to Stella when he said that what...

It puzzled Stella extremely that she found herself unable to say, "What is it that you want, Julian?" She knew that there was something that he wanted, and there was nothing tha...

Stella was afraid that when she went down to dinner it would be like slipping into another life--a life to which she was attached by her love for Julian, but to which she did no...

It would be too strong an expression to say that after Stella's departure Julian suffered from reaction. He himself couldn't have defined what he suffered from, but he was uneasy.

This is going to be my last love-letter to you, Stella. I wonder if you will know it is a love-letter. It won't sound particularly like one. It's to tell you that I can't go thr...

It was the hour of the day that Julian liked least. Until four o'clock in the afternoon his mind was protected by blinkers; he saw the road ahead of him, but the unmerciful vast...

Julian's first impulse was to drive to the town hall and carry Stella off. He was debarred from doing so only by a secret fear that she might refuse to come. He was a little afr...

"Mr. Travers is still in 'is room," Humphreys admitted gloomily; "'e came back an hour ago. Gawd knows how long 'e'll be at it. There's been a tri-bunal and wot not this afterno...