It seemed suitable, when making a selection of short stories forpublication in book form, to include my first attempt with my last, andtherefore the very juvenile production—"Miss Jones and theMasterpiece"—finds a place with the others.
My thanks are due to the Editors of the Century Magazine, Scribners'Magazine, and the English Review, for allowing me to republish thestories that appeared in their pages.
November, 1912.
THE NEST
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
THE WHITE PAGODA
THE SUICIDE
A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
Other Books by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
He seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a cornerof the railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under thecircumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for theswift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemedinappropriate, an appanage that he should have left behind him for everon stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hoursago. When a man has but a month—at most two months—to live, smallhopes and fears should drop from him: he should be stripped, as it were,for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death.
But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there toPaddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft,strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from theshade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hallposter—a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing inhis slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of thePark on a silvery sky;—he had found himself responding to these withpity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him nowwhat they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon tocease must change all their meaning,—at least, so one would havesupposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over theapparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but