To Laurel....

There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the ...

The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the...

Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and zwieback as the basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome befo...

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who loved the milder “Gothic motives” had built what he liked: it was to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he ...

Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their ret...

It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room, and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impell...

Mrs. Vertrees “sat up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come...

Edith, glancing casually into the “ready-made” library, stopped abruptly, seeing Bibbs there alone. He was standing before the pearl-framed and golden-lettered poem, musingly inspecting it. He read it...

Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean air beneath a glorious sky⁠—that sky so despised in the city, a...

Bibbs’s room, that neat apartment for transients to which the “lamidal” George had shown him upon his return, still bore the appearance of temporary quarters, possibly because Bibbs had no clear conce...

Sheridan had decided to conclude his day’s work early that afternoon, and at about two o’clock he left his office with a man of affairs from foreign parts, who had traveled far for a business conferen...

Standing in the black group under gaunt trees at the cemetery, three days later, Bibbs unwillingly let an old, old thought become definite in his mind: the sickly brother had buried the strong brother...

Bibbs went home pondering. He did not understand why Sibyl had laughed. The laughter itself had been spontaneous and beyond suspicion, but it seemed to him that she had only affected the effort to sup...

The outward usualness of things continued after dinner. It was Sheridan’s custom to read the evening paper beside the fire in the library, while his wife, sitting near by, either sewed (from old habit...

Mary was the picture of a lady flustered. She stood with one hand closing the gate behind her, and she had turned to go in the direction Bibbs was walking. There appeared to be nothing for it but that...

But when she asked him what it meant, on their homeward way, he was silent. They had come a few paces from the church without speaking, walking slowly. “I’ll tell you what it meant to me,” she said, a...

That “mystery about pianos” which troubled Bibbs had been a mystery to Mr. Vertrees, and it was being explained to him at about the time Bibbs scribbled the reference to it in his notes. Mary had gone...

At seven o’clock on the last morning of that month, Sheridan, passing through the upper hall on his way to descend the stairs for breakfast, found a couple of scribbled sheets of notepaper lying on th...

He emerged only upon a second summons to dinner, two hours later, and came to the table so white and silent that his wife made her anxiety manifest and was but partially reassured by his explanation t...

When he came into the New House, a few minutes later, he found his father sitting alone by the library fire. Bibbs went in and stood before him. “I’m cured, father,” he said. “When do I go back to the...

“Who looks a mustang in the eye? Changety, chang, chang! Bash! Crash! Bang!” So sang Bibbs, his musical gaieties inaudible to his fellow-workmen because of the noise of the machinery. He had discovere...

There seems to be another curious thing about Love [Bibbs wrote]. Love is blind while it lives and only opens its eyes and becomes very wide awake when it dies. Let it alone until then. You cannot rea...

Bibbs continued to live in the shelter of his dream. He had told Edith, after his ineffective effort to be useful in her affairs, that he had decided that he was “a member of the family”; but he appea...

Sheridan waited until he heard the sound of the outer door closing; then he rose and pushed a tiny disk set in the wall. Jackson appeared. “Has Bibbs got home from work?” “Mist’ Bibbs? No, suh.” “Tell...

There was sleet that evening, with a whopping wind, but neither this storm nor that other which so imminently threatened him held place in the consciousness of Bibbs Sheridan when he came once more to...

George departed, and Bibbs was left gazing upon chaos and listening to thunder. He could not reach the stairway without passing the open doors of the library, and he was convinced that the mere glimps...

Mrs. Sheridan, in a wrapper, noiselessly opened the door of her husband’s room at daybreak the next morning, and peered within the darkened chamber. At the old house they had shared a room, but the ar...

It is the consoling attribute of unused books that their decorative warmth will so often make even a ready-made library the actual “living-room” of a family to whom the shelved volumes are indeed seal...

As Bibbs came out of the New House, a Sunday trio was in course of passage upon the sidewalk: an ample young woman, placid of face; a black-clad, thin young man, whose expression was one of habitual a...

Sibyl and Roscoe were upon the point of leaving when Bibbs returned to the New House. He went straight to Sibyl and spoke to her quietly, but so that the others might hear. “When you said that if I’d ...

And so Bibbs sat in the porch of the temple with the money-changers. But no one came to scourge him forth, for this was the temple of Bigness, and the changing of money was holy worship and true relig...

It was a full hour later when he left her lying upon a couch in her own room, still lamenting intermittently, though he assured her with heat that the fuss she was making irked him far more than his p...

There was a heavy town-fog that afternoon, a smoke-mist, densest in the sanctuary of the temple. The people went about in it, busy and dirty, thickening their outside and inside linings of coal-tar, a...