The Unbearable Bassington

TOWARDS four o’clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop entrance near the Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran almost into the arms of Merla Blathlington. The...

A DOOR closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved drawing-room. The visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her afternoon-tea table had just taken hi...

COMUS found his way to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their appearance...

FRANCESCA prided herself on being able to see things from other people’s points of view, which meant, as it usually does, that she could see her own point of view from various a...

ELAINE DE FREY sat at ease—at bodily ease—at any rate—in a low wicker chair placed under the shade of a group of cedars in the heart of a stately spacious garden that had almost...

FRANCESCA BASSINGTON sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue Street, W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress sandwiches. The mea...

ELAINE YOUGHAL sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna’s costlier hotels. The double-headed eagle, with its “K.u.K.” legend, everywhere met the eye and announced the im...

THE Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood of the tea-buffet, by a fashionable throng of art-patrons which had gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock’s col...

AFTER the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embr...

IN the warmth of a late June morning the long shaded stretch of raked earth, gravel-walk and rhododendron bush that is known affectionately as the Row was alive with the monoton...

IT was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of t...

THE farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in honour of her son’s departure threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully successful function. In the first plac...

ON the evening of a certain November day, two years after the events heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way through the crowd that filled the rooms of her f...

THE bleak rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James’s Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois innovator has rushed ambitiously tim...

IT was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a river that gave back a haze of heat from its waters as though it were some stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet see...

ON a conveniently secluded bench facing the Northern Pheasantry in the Zoological Society’s Gardens, Regent’s Park, Courtenay Youghal sat immersed in mature flirtation with a la...

LANCELOT CHETROF stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half an hour older with a certain painful experience alre...