Richard Carter had called the place "Crownlands," not to please
himself, or even his wife. But it was to his mother's newly born
family pride that the idea of being the Carters of Crownlands made
its appeal. The estate, when he bought it, had belonged to a
Carter, and the tradition was that two ...
The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April
sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players
scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at
Belvedere Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped
sweaters, the women's scarlet coats and wh ...
At about four o'clock on a windy, warm September afternoon, four
girls came out of the post-office of Monroe, California. They had
loitered on their way in, consciously wasting time; they had spent
fifteen minutes in the dark and dirty room upon an absolutely
unnecessary errand, and now they sa ...
"Well, we couldn't have much worse weather than this for the last
week of school, could we?" Margaret Paget said in discouragement.
She stood at one of the school windows, her hands thrust deep in
her coat pockets for warmth, her eyes following the whirling course
of the storm that howled outsi ...
"Annie, what are you doing? Polishing the ramekins? Oh, that's
right. Did the extra ramekins come from Mrs. Brown? Didn't! Then as
soon as the children come back I'll send for them; I wish you'd
remind me. Did Mrs. Binney come? and Lizzie? Oh, that's good. Where
are they? Down in the cellar! Oh ...
Not the place in which to look for the Great Adventure, the dingy,
narrow office on the mezzanine floor of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's
great wholesale drug establishment, in San Francisco city, at the
beginning of the present century. Nothing could have seemed more
monotonous, more grimy, less in ...
Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and
shut it behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the
knob, and her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising
and falling on deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California,
she was just eighteen, and ...
To Emeline, wife of George Page, there came slowly, in her
thirtieth year, a sullen conviction that life was monstrously
unfair. From a resentful realization that she was not happy in her
marriage, Emeline's mind went back to the days of her pert,
precocious childhood and her restless and disco ...
Lizzie, who happened to be the Salisbury's one servant at the time,
was wasteful. It was almost her only fault, in Mrs. Salisbury's
eyes, for such trifles as her habit of becoming excited and "saucy,"
in moments of domestic stress, or to ask boldly for other holidays
than her alternate Sunday a ...
The marriage of Albert Bradley and Anne Polk Barrett was as close
as anything comes, in these prosaic days, to a high adventure.
Nancy's Uncle Thomas, a quiet, gentle old Southerner who wore tan
linen suits when he came to New York, which was not often, and
Bert's mother, a tiny Boston woman wh ...
"You look glorious. What's the special programme you've laid out for
this morning, Sue?" said Susanna's husband, coming upon her in her
rose garden early on a certain perfect October morning.
In the blazing heat of a July afternoon, Mrs. Cyrus Austin Phelps,
of Boston, arrived unexpectedly at the Yerba Buena rancho in
California. She was the only passenger to leave the train at the
little sun-burned platform that served as a station, and found not
even a freight agent there, of whom ...
The rain had stopped; and after long days of downpour, there seemed
at last to be a definite change. Anne Warriner, standing at one of
the dining-room windows, with the tiny Virginia in her arms, could
find a decided brightening in the western sky. Roofs--the roofs that
made a steep sky-line ab ...
Sometimes Ferdie's jokes were successful; sometimes they were not.
This was one of the jokes that didn't succeed; but as it led to a
chain of circumstances that proved eminently satisfactory, Ferdie's
wife praised him as highly for his share in it as if he really had
done something rather merit ...
After the meat course, Mrs. Tolley and Min rather languidly removed
the main platters and, by reaching backward, piled the dinner plates
on the shining new oak sideboard. Thus room was made for the salad,
which was always mantled in tepid mayonnaise, whether it was sliced
tomatoes, or potatoes, ...
Through the tremulous beauty of the California woods, in the silent
April afternoon, came Sammy Peneyre, riding Clown. The horse chose
his own way on the corduroy road, for the rider was lost in dreams.
Clown was a lean old dapple gray so far advanced in years and
ailments that when Doctor Pene ...
A blazing afternoon of mid-July lay warmly over the old Carolan
house, and over the dusty, neglected gardens that enclosed it. The
heavy wooden railing of the porch, half smothered in dry vines, was
hot to the touch, as were the brick walks that wound between parched
lawns and the ruins of old ...
At the head of her own breakfast table,--a breakfast table
charmingly littered with dark-blue china and shining glass, and made
springlike by a great bowl of daisies,--Mary Venable sat alone,
trying to read her letters through a bitter blur of tears. She was
not interested in her letters, but s ...
Duncan Coppered felt that his father's second marriage was a great
mistake. He never said so; that would not have been Duncan's way.
But he had a little manner of discreetly compressing his lips, when,
the second Mrs. Coppered was mentioned, eying his irreproachable
boots, and raising his hands ...
"Well, I am discovered--and lost." Julie, lazily making the
announcement after a long silence, shut her magazine with a sigh of
sleepy content; and braced herself more comfortably against the old
rowboat that was half buried in sand at her back. She turned as she
spoke to smile at the woman nea ...
If only my poor child had a sensible mother," said Mrs. Tressady,
calmly, "I suppose we would get Big Hong's 'carshen' for him, and
that would do perfectly! But I will not have a Chinese man for
Timothy's nurse! It seems all wrong, somehow."
In the sunny morning-room there prevailed an atmosphere of business.
Rosemary, at the desk, was rapidly writing notes and addressing
envelopes. Theodore, a deep wrinkle crossing his forehead, was
struggling to reduce to order a confused heap of crumpled and
illegible papers. Before him lay litt ...
"For mercy's sakes, here comes Shandon Waters!" said Jane Dinwoodie,
of the post-office, leaving her pigeonholes to peer through the one
small window of that unpretentious building. "Mother, here's Shandon
Waters driving into town with the baby!" breathed pretty Mary
Dickey, putting an awed fac ...
A capped and aproned maid, with a martyred expression, had twice
sounded the dinner-bell in the stately halls of Costello, before any
member of the family saw fit to respond to it.