When a Man Marries

When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked them to give up other engageme...

It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had...

The minute I had consented I regretted it. After all, what were Jimmy’s troubles to me? Why should I help him impose on an unsuspecting elderly woman? And it was only putting of...

It was infuriating to see how much enjoyment every one but Jim and myself got out of the situation. They howled with mirth over the feeblest jokes, and when Max told a story wit...

There is hardly any use trying to describe what followed. Anne Brown began to cry, and talk about the children. (She went to Europe once and stayed until they all got over the w...

Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different grade of society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they are restrained by obligation or environment they b...

It was Betty Mercer who said she was hungry, and got us switched from the delicate subject of which was the thief to the quite as pressing subject of which was to be cook. Aunt...

The following letters were found in the house post box after the lifting of the quarantine, and later were presented to me by their writers, bound in white kid (the letters, not...

The most charitable thing would be to say nothing about the first day. We were baldly brutal--that’s the only word for it. And Mr. Harbison, with his beautiful courtesy--the rea...

I was roused by someone walking across the roof, the cracking of tin under feet, and a comfortable and companionable odor of tobacco. I moved a very little, and then I saw that...

Really, I have left Aunt Selina rather out of it, but she was important as a cause, not as a result; at least at first. She came out strong later. I believe she was a very nice...

I was quite ill the next morning--from excitement, I suppose. Anyhow, I did not get up, and there wasn’t any breakfast. Jim said he roused Flannigan at eight o’clock, to go down...

Aunt Selina got up the next morning and Jim told her all the strange things that had been happening. She fixed on Flannigan, of course, although she still suspected Betty of her...

Dal had been acting strangely all day. Once, early in the evening, when I had doubled no trump, he led me a club without apology, and later on, during his dummy, I saw him writi...

Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all morning. And Jim was impossible. He ref...

Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of it and of some footprints in the coa...

The clash that came that evening had been threatening for some time. Take an immovable body, represented by Mr. Harbison and his square jaw, and an irresistible force, Jimmy and...

I didn’t go to the drawing room again. I went into my own room and sat in the dark, and tried to be furiously angry, and only succeeded in feeling queer and tingly. One thing wa...

She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being occupied with each other, sitting side by s...

Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila Mercer had discovered a box of bonbons that she had forgotten, and we divided them around. Aunt Selina asked for th...

Late that evening Betty Mercer and Dallas were writing verses of condolence to be signed by all of us and put under the door into Jim’s room when Bella came running down the sta...

I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over me, I half fell down the stairs...

The second floor was empty. A table lay overturned at the top of the stairs, and a broken flower vase was weltering in its own ooze. Part way down Betty stepped on something sha...