BY the time that Sylvia reached Paris she no longer blamed anybody but herself for what had happened. Everything had come about through her own greed in trying simultaneously to snatch from life artistic success and domestic bliss: she had never made a serious attempt to choose between them, and now she had lost both; for she could not expect to run away like this and succeed elsewhere to the same degree or even in the same way as in London.

IT may have been that the porter at York railway station was irritated by Sunday duty, or it may have been that the outward signs of wealth in his client were not conspicuous; whatever the cause, he spoke rudely to her. Yet Jasmine Grant was not a figure that ought to have aroused the insolence of a porter, even if he was on Sunday duty. To be sure, her black clothes were not fashionable; and a journey from the South of Italy to the North of England, having obliterated what slight pretensions to cut they might once have possessed, had left her definitely draggled.

THE slow train puffed away into the unadventurous country; and the bees buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again audible. The last farewell that Guy Hazlewood flung over his shoulder to a parting friend was more casual than it would have been, had he not at the same moment been turning to ask the solitary porter how many cases of books awaited his disposition. They were very heavy, it seemed; and the porter, as he led the way toward the small and obscure purgatory through which every package for Shipcot must pass, declared he was surprized to hear these cases...

OUR house is very high and red, The steps are very white, The balcony is full of flowers, The knocker's very bright.

Frightened by some alarm of sleep that was forgotten in the moment of waking, a little boy threw back the bedclothes and with quick heart and breath sat listening to the torrents of darkness that went rolling by. He dared not open his mouth to scream lest he should be suffocated; he dared not put out his arm to search for the bell-rope lest he should be seized; he dared not hide beneath the blankets lest he should be kept there; he could do nothing except sit up trembling in a vain effort to orientate himself.

WEST KENSINGTON relies for romance more upon the eccentricities of individual residents than upon any variety or suggestiveness in the scenery of its streets, which indeed are mostly mere lines of uniform gray or red houses drearily elongated by constriction. Yet the suburb is too near to London for some relics of a former rusticity not to have survived; and it is refreshing for the casual observer of a city's growth to find here and there a row of old cottages, here and there a Georgian house rising from sooty flower-gardens and shadowed by rusty cedars, occasionally even an open space of...

THE meagre sun that for thirteen pallid February days had shone with no more brilliance than a rushlight stuck amid the cobwebs of a garret, poured down at last his profuse glories, and Curtain Wells woke up to a fine morning and the burden of conscious existence, with an effort all the more completely unanimous on account of its reputation as an inland Spa. Residence there implied an almost monastick ideal of regularity. Other shrines of AEsculapius, falling from their primitive purity of worship, might set up for adoration a hooped Venus or bag-wigged Cupid, but Curtain Wells would never...

THERE was nothing to distinguish the departure of the Murmania from that of any other big liner leaving New York in October for Liverpool or Southampton. At the crowded gangways there was the usual rain of ultimate kisses, from the quayside the usual gale of speeding handkerchiefs. Ladies in blanket-coats handed over to the arrangement of their table-stewards the expensive bouquets presented by friends who, as the case might be, had been glad or sorry to see them go. Middle-aged gentlemen, who were probably not at all conspicuous on shore, at once made their appearance in caps that they might...

ALL day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and translucent as in a lake's tranquillity. The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a muffin-man, abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked the...

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.