Categories
- Antiques & Collectibles 13
- Architecture 36
- Art 47
- Bibles 22
- Biography & Autobiography 810
- Body, Mind & Spirit 47
- Business & Economics 24
- Computers 4
- Cooking 94
- Crafts & Hobbies 3
- Drama 346
- Education 45
- Family & Relationships 34
- Fiction 11811
- Games 19
- Gardening 17
- Health & Fitness 33
- History 1377
- House & Home 1
- Humor 147
- Juvenile Fiction 1873
- Juvenile Nonfiction 202
- Language Arts & Disciplines 88
- Law 16
- Literary Collections 686
- Literary Criticism 179
- Mathematics 13
- Medical 41
- Music 39
- Nature 179
- Non-Classifiable 1768
- Performing Arts 7
- Periodicals 1453
- Philosophy 62
- Photography 2
- Poetry 896
- Political Science 203
- Psychology 42
- Reference 154
- Religion 451
- Science 126
- Self-Help 7
- Social Science 80
- Sports & Recreation 34
- Study Aids 3
- Technology & Engineering 59
- Transportation 23
- Travel 463
- True Crime 29
The Middle of Things
Categories:
Description:
Excerpt
CHAPTER I
FACED WITH REALITY
On that particular November evening, Viner, a young gentleman of means and leisure, who lived in a comfortable old house in Markendale Square, Bayswater, in company with his maiden aunt Miss Bethia Penkridge, had spent his after-dinner hours in a fashion which had become a habit. Miss Penkridge, a model housekeeper and an essentially worthy woman, whose whole day was given to supervising somebody or something, had an insatiable appetite for fiction, and loved nothing so much as that her nephew should read a novel to her after the two glasses of port which she allowed herself every night had been thoughtfully consumed and he and she had adjourned from the dining-room to the hearthrug in the library. Her tastes, however, in Viner's opinion were somewhat, if not decidedly, limited. Brought up in her youth on Miss Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Penkridge had become a confirmed slave to the sensational. She had no taste for the psychological, and nothing but scorn for the erotic. What she loved was a story which began with crime and ended with a detection—a story which kept you wondering who did it, how it was done, and when the doing was going to be laid bare to the light of day. Nothing pleased her better than to go to bed with a brain titivated with the mysteries of the last three chapters; nothing gave her such infinite delight as to find, when the final pages were turned, that all her own theories were wrong, and that the real criminal was somebody quite other than the person she had fancied. For a novelist who was so little master of his trade as to let you see when and how things were going, Miss Penkridge had little but good-natured pity; for one who led you by all sorts of devious tracks to a startling and surprising sensation she cherished a whole-souled love; but for the creator of a plot who could keep his secret alive and burning to his last few sentences she felt the deepest thing that she could give to any human being—respect. Such a master was entered permanently on her mental library list.
At precisely ten o'clock that evening Viner read the last page of a novel which had proved to be exactly suited to his aunt's tastes. A dead silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackling of the logs in the grate. Miss Penkridge dropped her knitting on her silk-gowned knees and stared at the leaping flames; her nephew, with an odd glance at her, rose from his easy-chair, picked up a pipe and began to fill it from a tobacco-jar on the mantelpiece. The clock had ticked several times before Miss Penkridge spoke.
"Well!" she said, with the accompanying sigh which denotes complete content. "So he did it! Now, I should never have thought it! The last person of the whole lot! Clever—very clever! Richard, you'll get all the books that that man has written!"
Viner lighted his pipe, thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers and leaned back against the mantelpiece.
"My dear aunt!" he said half-teasingly, half-seriously....