The Thread of Flame

When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on either side.

The hall was papered in deep crimson, against which a monumental black-walnut hat-and-umbrella stand was visible chiefly because of the gleam of an inset mirror. The floors were...

I didn't think it necessary to remind Vio that the strife of tongues could go on even if we didn't hear it. Nothing else was possible when Wolf's fatuity blew the trumpet and be...

That, it seemed, had been at the Settlement, to which Miss Blair had retired after some trying situations as a model. Stenography being taught at the Settlement, she had taken i...

"Man, if she heard your voice like that it would kill her. You don't _know_. No, I must go; there's no help for it, headache or no headache. Mildred dear, won't you call Annette...

"Only a little younger than you, madam; and not half so beautiful. Madam knows that any woman worth her salt is mother to any man down on his luck. I don't care who he is, or wh...

It was blocked by what appeared to be a long cylindrical bar, some two or three feet in diameter. Covered with burlap, it ran from a motor truck, in which one end still rested,...

"Because there's no other way of doing it. Don't you see? If you just come in by the back door--" She left this sentiment to continue in her own way. "Alice Mountney is going to...

Of the interval between taking the train at St.-Pierre, probably to go southward toward Bordeaux, and my waking on board the _Auvergne_ I have as yet only such fragments of memo...

"By wishing, in the first place. It began to seem to me such a foolish thing that, being given all the advantages in the world, I could do nothing but frustrate them. I was like...

She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me honest, now. Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?" "Suppose I say that--that I ain't." "Say, kid!" she re...

"A man--like you, for instance--can be so free; but a woman has to live within exact limitations. The only way she can get any liberty at all is within her own home. Not that my...

"There's not tin women in New York 'll know the difference betwane a Kirmanshah and an Anatolia," Denis said to me one day, "and it'd make ye sorry for thim when they comes to f...

I was obliged to note at once that the Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence was chiefly of Domestic. Women crowded the hall, the two large rooms across the way, and the...

For a few hours that danger did not suggest itself. That is, I was so busy speculating as to Mildred Averill's meaning that I had no time to analyze the way I was taking it. Wei...

Bewilderment was my first reaction now; the second was amazement. Reading the papers with no preparation from the day before, or from the day before that--with no preparation at...

So I looked like that! It was a surprise to me. I had thought he might mention the Embassy. My sense of superior standing was so strong that I expected another man of superior s...

Miss Flowerdew's setting my only standard as to "Rooms," I had imagined myself as walking into something of the kind, though possibly more cheerful. It is hardly necessary to sa...

"I wish I could think so; but I've believed so many false yarns on the strength of a man's manner, and disbelieved so many true ones on the same evidence, that I no longer trust...

"I just want to say that the things she told me, the things she pretended to betray, were things I knew more or less already. I'd been coming to the same conclusions for myself,...