Fiction Books

CHAPTER I MR. AND MRS. SETH APPLEBY were almost old. They called each other “Father” and “Mother.” But frequently they were guilty of holding hands, or of cuddling together in corners, and Father was a person of stubborn youthfulness. For something over forty years Mother had been trying to make him stop smoking, yet every time her back was turned he would sneak out his amber cigarette-holder... more...

A GRAPEFRUIT PRELUDE. Splash! The grapefruit hit her in the eye! Splash! His psychic wave was dashed to smithereens! “Oh! Oh!” the two girls screamed in unison. “D–––!” the young man sitting near ejaculated. For ten minutes there in the Oak Room of the Ritz-Carlton he had been hurling across the narrow intervening space this mental command to the girl facing him: “Look here! Look at me!... more...

Since the Koenig Wilhelm, of the Dutch East India Service, left Batavia, the sky had been torpidly blue, that suffocating indigo which seems so neighborly that the traveller fancies were he a trifle taller he could touch it with the ferule of his stick. When night came, the stars would issue from their ambush and stab it through and through, but the glittering cicatrices which they made left it bluer... more...

CHAPTER I THE SHOP It was an evening early in May. The sun was low, and the street was mottled with the shadows of its paving-stones—smooth enough, but far from evenly set. The sky was clear, except for a few clouds in the west, hardly visible in the dazzle of the huge light, which lay among them like a liquid that had broken its vessel, and was pouring over the fragments. The street was almost... more...

CHAPTER I THE SAINT OF VICTORIA STREET Refinement had more power over the soul of Valentine Cresswell than religion. It governed him with a curious ease of supremacy, and held him back without effort from most of the young man's sins. Each age has its special sins. Each age passes them, like troops in review, before it decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided to join any... more...

CHAPTER I. IN THE THEATRE NATIONAL And yet people found the opportunity to amuse themselves, to dance and to go to the theatre, to enjoy music and open-air cafes and promenades in the Palais Royal. New fashions in dress made their appearance, milliners produced fresh "creations," and jewellers were not idle. A grim sense of humour, born of the very intensity of ever-present danger, had dubbed... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCES MR. LEWISHAM. The opening chapter does not concern itself with Love—indeed that antagonist does not certainly appear until the third—and Mr. Lewisham is seen at his studies. It was ten years ago, and in those days he was assistant master in the Whortley Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex, and his wages were forty pounds a year, out of which he had to afford fifteen shillings... more...

op Ganlon was no hero—he was only a spaceman. A spaceman and a father. In fact, Pop was rather no-account, even in a profession that abounded with drifters. He had made a meagre living prospecting asteroids and hauling light freight and an occasional passenger out in the Belt Region. Coffee and cakes, nothing more. Not many people knew Pop had a son in the Patrol, and even fewer knew it when the boy... more...

CHAPTER I "How serene the joy,when things that are made for each other meetand are joined;but ah,—how rarely they meet and are joined, the thingsthat are made for each other!"—SAO-NAN. When Peter Moore entered the static-room, picked his way swiftly and unnoticingly across the littered floor, and jerked open the frosted glass door of the chief operator's office, the assembled operators... more...

It was before the Idiot's marriage, and in the days when he was nothing more than a plain boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's High-class Home for Single Gentlemen, that he put what the School-master termed his "alleged mind" on plans for the amelioration of the condition of the civilized. "The trials of the barbarian are really nothing as compared with the tribulations of civilized... more...