“You won’t be late?” There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling’s voice, there was something like entreaty. “No, I won’t be late,” said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice an...

Three Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall. The wealth of newly industrialized England and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius of Charles Barry called them up out of th...

Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servant’s quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory. The younger Tantamounts were generally military. But the heir bei...

Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie. Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermess; algebra cut capers. The music ca...

A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers⁠—it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he ...

“De Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,” said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of...

Mrs. Betterton had been shaken off, his father and Lady Edward distantly waved to and avoided; Walter was free to continue his search. And at last he found what he was looking for. Lucy Tantamount had...

“What I complain of,” said Mark Rampion, “is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our world.” Mary Rampion laughed, wholeheartedly from the depths of her lungs. It was a laugh one could not hear witho...

“What a blotch!” said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and it...

“A regular technique,” Spandrell repeated. “One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking ...

In Lucy’s neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public. The more the merrier was her principle; or if “merrier” were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously dis...

For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at...

Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm⁠—calm with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled; everything⁠—for in the co...

Miss Fulkes rotated the terrestrial globe until the crimson triangle of India was opposite their eyes. “That’s Bombay,” she said, pointing with her pencil. “That’s where Daddy and Mummy took the ship....

During the weeks which followed their final scene, Walter and Marjorie lived in relations of a peculiar and unpleasant falsity. They were very considerate to one another, very courteous, and whenever ...

The Rampions lived in Chelsea. Their house consisted of one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked onto it. A very nice little place, in its rather ramshackle way, Burlap reflected, as he...

It had been raining for days. To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul. He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a pu...

At Port Said they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a li...

Little Phil was lying on his bed. The room was in an orange twilight. A thin needle of sunshine came probing in between the drawn curtains. Phil was more than usually restless. “What’s the time?” he s...

Of Philip Quarles’s father old John Bidlake used to say that he was like one of those baroque Italian churches with sham façades. High, impressive, bristling with classical orders, broken pedimenta an...

“A month ago,” said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street station, “we were in Udaipur.” “It certainly seems improbable,” said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark. “Thes...

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook. Today, at Lucy Tantamount’s, I was the victim of a very odd association of ideas. Lucy, as usual, was the French tricolor; blue round the eyes, a scarlet mouth, and the...

The writing table was under the window. Dimmed by the smoky air of Sheffield, a shaft of yellow, viscous-looking sunlight lit up a corner of the table and a patch of red and flowered carpet. Everard W...

Local government among the Indians under the Maurya emperors continued, week after week, to necessitate Mr. Quarles’s attendance at the British Museum for at least two full days in every seven. “I had...

Quai Voltaire. The air was rough, I forgot the Quiés for my ears and was in a Hell of Noise for 2½ hours. Feeling very tired and consequently, sweet Walter, rather sentimental and sola sola. Why aren’...

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook. Found Rampion gloomy and exasperated, I don’t know what about, and consequently pessimistic⁠—lyrically and violently so. “I give the present dispensation ten years,” he...

John Bidlake and his third wife had never definitely or officially parted company. They simply didn’t see one another very often, that was all. The arrangement suited John very well. He hated everythi...

With Molly d’Exergillod everything had to be articulate, formulated, expressed. The whole of experience was, for her, only the raw material out of which an active mind could manufacture words. Iron-st...

The scene was Hyde Park; the day, a Saturday in June. Dressed in green and wearing a sword, Everard Webley was addressing a thousand British Freemen from the back of his white horse, Bucephalus. With ...

Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentimental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrongdoers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the societ...

A crossword problem had brought Mr. Quarles to the seventeenth volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Idle curiosity detained him. The Lord Chamberlain, he learned, carries a white staff and wears a g...

In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone. Faint rumblings of faraway traffic caressed the warm silence. A bowl of her mother’s potpourri peopled the air for her with countless poten...

Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. “How is he?” she asked the chauffeur. But Jaxton was vague, didn’t rightly know. Private...

It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s. Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion. Philip came limping across ...

Next day, instead of whimpering with every return of pain, the child began to scream⁠—cry after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what seemed to Elinor an eter...

The Webley Mystery, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete. There was no clue. At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything. Webley had left at the usual hour and by his ...

Spandrell was very insistent that they should come without delay. The “heilige Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart” simply must be heard. “You can’t understand anything...