Romance Books

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the... more...

INTRODUCTION Anthony Trollope was an established novelist of great renown when Nina Balatka was published in 1866, twenty years after his first novel. Except for La Vendée, his third novel, set in France during the Revolution, all his previous works were set in England or Ireland and dealt with the upper levels of society: the nobility and the landed gentry (wealthy or impoverished), and a few... more...

CHAPTER I   LISA'S KNIGHT AND LISA'S SISTER It had come at last, the moment I had been thinking about for days. I was going to have him all to myself, the only person in the world I ever loved. He had asked me to sit out two dances, and that made me think he really must want to be with me, not just because I'm the "pretty girl's sister," but because I'm myself, Lisa... more...

You might enter this story by the stage door. You remember beautiful Valentine Germain—the actress? She married Robert Oglebay, the painter, brother of Sir Peter Oglebay, the great engineer. Their baby Phyllis— But, after all, the main entrance is more dignified. Sir Peter Oglebay's passion is for Construction: to watch massive machinery slowly hoisting materials more massive into positions of... more...

CHAPTER I Say, what's next to knowin' when you're well off? Why, thinkin' you are. Which is a little nugget of wisdom I panned out durin' a chat I had not long ago with Mr. Quinn, that I used to work under when I was on the door of the Sunday sheet, three or four years back. "Hail, Torchy!" says he, as we meets accidental on Broadway. "Still carrying the burning... more...

She had never felt so tired of it all, it seemed to her. The sun streamed hot across the backs of the shining seats into her eyes, but she was too tired to get the window-pole. She watched the incoming class listlessly, wondering whether it would be worth while to ask one of them to close the shutter. They chattered and giggled and bustled in, rattling the chairs about, and begging one another's... more...

"I suspected him from the first," said Miss Gould, with some irritation, to her lodger. She spoke with irritation because of the amused smile of the lodger. He bowed with the grace that characterized all his lazy movements. "He looked very much like that Tom Waters that I had at the Reformed Drunkards' League last year. I even thought he was Tom—" "I do not know Tom?"... more...

TO Belden, pacing the library doggedly, the waiting seemed interminable, the strain unnecessarily prolonged. A half-hour ago quick feet had echoed through the upper halls, windows had opened, doors all but slammed, vague whisperings and drawn breaths had hovered impalpably about the whole place; but now all was utterly quiet. His own regular footfall alone disturbed the unnatural stillness of a large... more...

They were having tea on the terrace. As Varian strolled up to the group he wished that Hunter could see the picture they made—Hunter, who had not been in America for thirty years, and who had been so honestly surprised when Varian had spoken of Mrs. Dud's pretty maids—she always had pretty ones, even to the cook's third assistant. "Maids? Maids? It used to be 'help,'" he... more...

"You don't think it's too young for me, girls?" "Young for you—par exemple! I should say not," her niece replied, perking the quivering aigrette still more obliquely upon her aunt's head. Carolyn used par exemple as a good cook uses onion—a hint of it in everything. There were those who said that she interpolated it in the Litany; but Carolyn, who was born Caroline... more...