The type-writer girl

I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could b...

Four months earlier I had suffered a great loss. How great a loss I am not careful to assure you. It is far from my desire to make capital out of my inmost heart. I cannot spin...

It was a wrench to tear myself away from my old men and women in the Isle of Dogs, for I truly loved them. The operation left a scar that was slow to heal. I felt I did them goo...

I prowled along the Strand, in quest of an inspiration. You will readily conceive that the situation was serious. I had disbursed my last coin for lunch that morning. True, I ha...

It flashed across me at a stroke what those golden balls meant. Never before had I divined their meaning—their intimate connection with my newly-chosen patron. I caught at it no...

We assembled in the large room of the first cottage I had seen—a sort of bare, bald dining-hall, big enough to feed some twenty or thirty souls, and ugly enough to take away the...

I respected Rothenburg; he was a man of ideas. Of course, they were wrong; but, according to his rush-lights, he acted them out. He seemed to me to have a shallow brain, in a co...

For the first three or four miles I kept on pedalling steadily. I grazed the corners, not even daring to look back, for I was haunted by a terror that Léon, with his lips, was o...

St. George joined tact to his chivalry. When we pulled up at the station, he handed us both out, unloaded our iron steeds, raised his hat with an amicable smile, and then, befor...

Perhaps you think I have made too much of those ancestors of mine who fought and bled at Lexington. That is always possible; if so, on further thought, you will feel that there...

My dear critic, has anybody more reason to regret that fact than its author? I have felt it all along. Yet reflect upon the circumstances. Ten thousand type-writer girls crowd L...

I grieve to hint a doubt of my chosen patron, but enlarged experience of St. Nicholas has led me to believe that he lacks consistency. His action is jerky. Though he will often...

It is a far cry from Verona to London. The ways of the Corso are not the ways of Pall Mall. Therefore, when I admit that my heart cried “A Romeo!” you are not to infer that I ha...

I regret to say that from that day forth Romeo was more marked in his courtesy to me than ever. His manner had always a tinge of sweet antique courtliness; but now he surpassed...

“Sidney Trevelyan is a great man,” Romeo said to me later; “but his ideas are _too_ great—especially his idea of his own greatness. This taints life for him: he moves in an atmo...

Next morning at lunch time, as I crossed Long Acre, I caught a glimpse of Michaela, in the gondola of London, steering rapidly northward. A big summer hat, all wild roses and go...

I have two reasons for my avoidance of the besetting sin of diary-writing. The first is that I am usually dog-tired with work when evening comes, so that to ask me to fill in a...

I have large estates in Hertfordshire and the adjoining counties, free of land tax. Some noble marquis, I am assured, lays claim to the bare loam, the ploughed fields, the turni...

When Linnæus first saw gorse in blossom he fell on his knees and thanked God. Our modern Pharisees, who say grace before meat, never, I fancy, say grace before Venice.

At the Molo we parted. The Donisthorpes, Romeo said, must long have been expecting him, fidgeting that he did not arrive; he knew not what lame excuse he could rake up to satisf...

I trailed back to my hotel, surely the most abject soul in Venice. Michaela’s misapprehension of my motives I did not resent; the American eagle in my breast had scarce a flap l...

So my poor little Odyssey had come to an end in shipwreck! Mr. Samuel Butler must be wrong, after all. I doubt a woman’s ability to handle these sustained epics. I was to get no...