THE   COUNTESS   OF
LOWNDES   SQUARE

And Other Stories

BY
E.   F.   BENSON
Author of “Mike,” etc., etc.


[Illustration: colophon]


CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

PREFACE

I have divided the stories that are here collected under one cover intovarious classes, so that such readers as want to compare their ownexperiments, let us say, in blackmailing or spiritualistic séances, withthose of other students, may find such tales as deal with their ownspeciality in crime or superstition grouped together in separatesections of this book. They will thus be spared a skipping hunt throughpages in which they feel no personal interest.

In the same way, such readers as are in search merely of the lighter(though not more decorative) aspects of life, will be able to avoid likepoison so innocent-looking a title as “The Countess of Lowndes Square,”for assuredly they would not find therein the fashionable descriptionsof high life which they might reasonably anticipate, but would merelycast the book from them in disgust, when they discovered that one whohad been the wife of an Earl, and ought therefore to have known ever somuch better, belonged to the most contemptible of the criminal classes.The table of contents, in like manner, conducts the crank and thecat-lover to the pastures where he is most likely to find a digestiblesnack.

The short story is not a lyre on which English writers thrum with thefirm delicacy of the French, or with the industry of the Americanauthor. If the ten best short stories in the world were proclaimed bypopular vote, it is probable that they would all be French stories;while if the million worst stories in the world were similarly broughttogether into one unspeakable library, they would probably all ofthem—with the exception, of course, of the fourteen that make up thisvolume—be found to be written in America. There is something in theprecision and economy of the French, something in the opulence andamateurishness of the United States that renders the result of such aplebiscite perfectly appropriate, and we should only, when the result ofthe poll was known, find in it another instance of the invariableoccurrence of the expected.

Most of the ensuing tales have appeared before in the pages of Nash’sWeekly, The Windsor Magazine, The Story-Teller, The Century, andThe Woman at Home. The rest are now published for the first time.

E. F. Benson.

CONTENTS