I was not rich -- on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding- house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to pick up material. I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: I have a pass...
The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert. The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls. As every one was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. The heat was in...
There was a longish period— the dense duration of a London winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid electric, with fierce 'incandescent' flares and glares— when they repeatedly met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pothouse a stone's-throw from the Strand. They talked always of pothouses, of feeding-time— by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the greatest, in a ma...
There was a longish period -- the dense duration of a London winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid electric, with fierce 'incandescent' flares and glares -- when they repeatedly met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pothouse a stone's-throw from the Strand. They talked always of pothouses, of feeding-time -- by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the greatest, i...
The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel, comparing, with a deliberation in which however there was still something of languor, the attractions of easy strolls. He liked the feeling of the south so far as you could have it in the north, he liked the sandy cliffs and the clustered pines, he liked even the colourless sea. Bournemouth as a health-resort had sounded like a mere adverti...