Within these walls

Yet it stood a hundred and fifty feet high, and the stem of it was so large that a man and a girl together could just touch hands about its bole by stretching their arms to full...

This was no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty mil...

Leaving the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than...

By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in thunder-salvos of battle, in passions...

All summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the plan for an open canal from a dam in the Cr...

This did not amuse RoBards. He wanted to hate Chalender; but justice was his foible, and he had to confess to his own prejudice that, while it was Chalenderish to appear in pump...

RoBards and Chalender ran as long as they could; then walked a while till the agony in their lungs eased a little; then ran again. At last they reached the East River.

The cart with the powder kegs moved on, but RoBards did not follow. The holiday of overturning buildings had ceased to suggest either a sacred duty or a pastime. He drifted irre...

Now that love had bridged another of the abysses that kept opening in the solid ground of their union, they fell a prey to curiosity. They decided simultaneously to go visit the...

The first mood of the stricken city was one of despair. Then anger mounted. Scapegoats were sought. Some laid the blame on the piped gas that had come into vogue ten years befor...

One day, while sinking an exploratory shaft, Chalender came upon a vein of the snowflake marble that underlay that region. He bored a tunnel through this frost that had become s...

Fiends of suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony mocked that complacency and told him t...

If Chalender had only risen in self-defence or reached for a weapon or spoken a word, whether of bravado or cowardice, it would have been easy for RoBards to rush him. If his li...

That night RoBards slept apart from his wife—in the spare room. He owed that much to his wrongs and she dared not try to wheedle him into the dangerous neighborhood of her beauty.

The sumptuousness of the Astor House only emphasized RoBards’ exile. From his window he would look down upon the seething throngs along Broadway, the tall beavers of the men and...

He was embarrassed to find that a cousin of his wife’s was visiting the farm and the spare room was filled. He had to go back with Patty. But they were like two enemies in the s...

Time was spreading its rust and its vines over everything, eating away the edges of his passions and fastening the hinges of his will so that it could not turn.

After years of waiting and wrangling, labor conflicts, lawsuits, political battles, technical wars, and unrelenting financial difficulties and desperate expedients, through year...

Back of the house and above it on a hilltop too rocky for clearing, too rough for pasture even, was a little pool ringed around with huge boulders. No one could explain them, th...

When RoBards had cried out all the blasphemy in his heart he fell to praying for some divine miracle to undo the past, to erase the truth and turn it into a nightmare. But soon...

It was black when Keith woke suddenly. Some little sound had pierced the depths of his profound immersion in sleep. He imagined Indians or Cowboys or Skinners. His ears seemed t...

RoBards was afraid to leave the house. How could he trust it to keep the secret? There would be nobody to guard the cellar from intrusion. Yet no intruder would be interested in...

The children had apparently forgotten all about the tragedy. The newness of the train-ride, the fear of missing something, of being late somewhere, of not being everywhere at on...

That procession was seven miles long, and everyone who marched or rode, and each of the massed spectators had his or her terror of life at the back of the heart. But RoBards kne...

The next morning RoBards was awake very betimes, driven from needed sleep by an onslaught of terrors. A thousand little fiends assailed him and bound him like Gulliver held fast...

Thereafter Patty and RoBards felt a need of keeping close. They slept together after that, her throat across his left arm. She called it “my arm,” and when his travels to distan...

The lightning had suffered a distinct loss of social prestige when Ben Franklin coaxed it out of the clouds with a kite-string and crowded it into a pickle jar. Its immemorial r...

The assembly was worthy of the suit and of the vast amount involved. It thrilled old Jessamine to be the man who dragged the metropolis itself to the bar of its own conscience,...

They found old Jessamine sprawled along the floor, his scrawny legs thrust stiffly out of his nightgown, his toes turned up in all awkwardness. His ropy neck seemed to have rele...

The New York papers published encomiums upon Mr. Jessamine and called him one of the merchant princes who had made New York the metropolis of the New World. A stranger reading t...

It came divinely opportune to Patty’s need, for her next child was about to tear its way into the world through her flesh suffering from old lacerations, and she prophesied that...

A strange thing, a word: and stranger, the terror of it. Stranger still, the things everybody knows that must never be named. Strangest of all, that the mind sees most vividly w...

He knew that she was in her brother’s arms, for he could hear his voice deep with sympathy. But RoBards dared not make a third there. It was no place for a father.

Patty had a linen cover stretched tight over the parlor carpet. She got in an appalling amount of supper material; oyster soup in gallons, _dinde aux truffes_ by the pound, ice...

The rest of the family might sleep its fill on the morrow, but RoBards had to go to court. Getting himself out of bed was like tearing his own meat from his bones. He could hard...

The tenderest moods of devotion and shared sorrows alternated with wrangles so bitter that murder seemed to hang in the air. Money was the root of most of the quarreling.

Then David and Patty RoBards were part of a stampede, striving to save their romance from the plague. Then they were bride and groom; now they carried with them a daughter, unfo...

Pain began in him, and fear. He had endured a stealthily creeping paralysis and when he heard Patty’s step, he was almost afraid to speak lest his words come forth brittle and f...

When he reached New York, RoBards had to take his frozen hands to a physician, who managed to save them for him, though there were times when the anguishes that clawed them made...

Once more the Croton River brought him clients—but also a civil war with his son Keith. This was a sore hurt to RoBards’ heart, for he and the boy had been mysteriously drawn to...

He found her lying on the floor of the parlor, where she had fainted. Her big crinoline skirts belled out and she looked like a huge tulip fallen on its side. Her feet sat up aw...

The newspapers made a pretty story of the Chalender-RoBards marital alliance. For once, they overlooked a horror and gave space to romance. The retreat in Westchester had saved...

Afraid to intervene in this idyl; ashamed of the un-American snobbery that made him wince at the prospect of a Lasher for a daughter-in-law; aghast at the thought of having to r...

When his father asked him what difference it made to him, he dodged awkwardly, talking of the beauty of the woods, the cider taste and fragrance of the air, the ugliness and noi...

The forty million Africans who had been raped from the Dark Continent and distributed among the Christian nations at so much per head, had made little active resistance to being...

There was acrid humiliation for RoBards in his inability to take a soldier’s part in the field. He did what he could on the countless boards, but he longed to be young, to ride...

Having lost one son in the war and expecting to hear at any moment that her other boy was gone, Patty was bitter now against the mothers who kept their sons at home, as she had...

Within the silken walls of Patty’s body, still beautiful as a jar of rose leaves, a secret enemy was brooding, building. A tulip tree, a tree of death was pushing its roots all...

The old house gathered her in and comforted her for a while. But chiefly it comforted her because it let her cry out without fear of notice from passers-by in the street or the...

When he had been confronted with the opportunity to end the life of Immy’s baby and with it numberless perils, RoBards had hesitated until the chance was taken from him.

He had opened the door just as his father bent and kissed his mother through her hair. He had understood what was being done, and saw that his intervention was too late. He coul...

Fleeing from the oppressiveness of the farm, RoBards returned to St. John’s Park to find it alive with memories of Patty. He loved to recall their quarrels, her vanities, her ex...

RoBards stood out on his porch to watch the battle of his trees, each engaged with some fierce unseen wrestler that tore off every rag of leaf and twisted every limb, but could...

While the young farmer and the two hired men labored in the rain that came as a deluge upon the gale’s heels, Mrs. Laight saddled and bridled a horse and forced it through the w...

The new New York was beyond her comprehension. She was appalled by the aged look of all her old friends whom she remembered as young friends. She and her mirror had kept such st...