The unlit lamp

They sat in total darkness while the hired hack dragged them up the hills of Staten Island; it was a bitter night, and Vincelle wasn’t prepared for it. He shivered and pulled th...

He waked the next morning to a marvelous peace. Pendleton was still sleeping beside him, and there was no other sound but his quiet breathing. Vincelle felt very wide awake; he...

“She’s been brought up,” the old lady began, and stopped. “After all, you’re the one to be suited, Gilbert. You’re marrying her, not I. If you’ve got it into your head that she’...

No one could have known this better. She was in her room, standing before the mirror, looking with critical attention at her image. She was at her loveliest and well she knew it...

Before she had been in that house an hour she knew that she could never be happy there. She wasn’t ready when the dinner gong sounded, but Gilbert hadn’t waited. Lateness upset...

She waked up in the dark, terrified by a great banging at the door. She thought the house was on fire, that someone was ill, that thieves had broken in. She shook Gilbert fierce...

In order to escape she had told the old lady a deliberate lie. She had said she was going shopping with Mrs. Martinsburgh, because Mrs. Martinsburgh was a highly approved of you...

The old lady was going upstairs to the store-room on one of her periodical rummaging excursions, conducted for mysterious purposes of her own. She looked through trunks, bags, a...

“Come on, Andrée!” she said. “We’ll be late for lunch and Mother does hate that so.... No: I suppose this _would_ be a treat for poor Father, after being shut up in a hot office...

And she slipped into her place behind the coffee urn, a little more ingratiating, a little more careful not to disturb him, than usual. He sat at the head of the table, glowerin...

It was a filial duty, as well as a wifely duty, to meet Gilbert’s train. He wished them all to do so, he liked to see these three charmingly dressed, feminine creatures all look...

Claudine waked up to the dull peace of a mountain Sunday. She could hear the grinding of the ice-cream freezer on the back porch, and far away the bell of the little Roman Catho...

She looked at him in surprise. He was sitting on the rail of the veranda where she had found him when she came out after her late and solitary breakfast. He looked well in his w...

After lunch they all, Claudine, Andrée, and Edna, dressed themselves in their ceremonial garments, the modish and immaculate white required by the gold-providing Gilbert, and we...

It was perhaps a mistake not to have told all this to Andrée. She had been almost all the afternoon in the woodshed with two baby kittens she adored, quite happy there in the di...

There was a very great deal that young Stephens didn’t know about himself, some of it that was obvious to other eyes. He did not go away the next morning; Edna met him after bre...

Claudine had put aside her philosophers that morning, and sat in her little glade, listless and wretched. An insufferable, intolerable summer, a summer altogether wrong and harm...

Gilbert was certainly very nervous. His nervousness took its usual form of a great rage and distress about his shirt, which he believed was inclined to bulge, and therefore to r...

“I’m going shopping early this morning,” said Claudine, at the breakfast-table the next morning. “There are some very good bargains advertised.... How soon do you think you coul...

Gilbert was alone in his office, working in one of his characteristic fits of great energy. A sort of inspiration would seize him, he would map out astounding campaigns, design...

That day she brought an electric tea-pot. They laughed when she took it from its box, for she always brought something, she was trying to introduce an element of house-keeping i...

Al didn’t say what he thought; it seemed to him a singularly infelicitous time for that. He was beginning to learn the rudiments of a lamentable sort of tact; he followed Andrée...

He was walking up and down that bedroom he so hated, with its silly little four post bed and the thick carpet, and the offensive, dainty imitation masculinity of it--a woman’s i...

To tell the truth, she would not really have been sorry to be ill. It would have been a respite from the nightmare life of the past weeks. Nothing but worry and distress about h...

Andrée was wandering about the “second parlour” that Sunday afternoon, in a state of joyful idleness, humming to herself. It was so blissful to be at home again, now that the ho...

Claudine sat down to answer her distressing correspondence. She took a long time to arrange her writing materials, to adjust the light, for her heart failed her, courage and hop...

Andrée was very late that evening. She had gone to the city to do some shopping, and at eight o’clock she had not yet returned. Claudine sat down to supper alone, but she could...