Mr. Bennett Collaborates with Curiosity in a Book of Short Stories
Elsie and the Child were friends. Elsie was Mrs. Raste's cook. The Child, Eva, was Mrs. Raste's daughter. Mrs. Raste wanted to send Eva away to boarding school. She wouldn't go. She and Elsie were friends. She loved Elsie better than her mother. That was the way of it; no explanation. Upstairs there were scenes; downstairs there were bubblings; in my lady's chamber there was bitterness of heart, all because a spoiled and lonely child was untowardly fond of a buman being who made the bread. Little Eva went to bed with a temperature. Elsie, ashamed somehow, offered to give notice. Then said Mrs. Raste, that admirable woman, knowing herself beaten, conceding that love is power: "Then you want to make it still more difficult for me. Do you want to kill my Eva?"
The Paper Cap was stuck on the head of a fastidious Matthew Park by a singularly beautiful woman whom, until the moment when she so clownishly crowned him, he had taken for a civilized person. It was a cap of disenchantment. It symbolized for him all the crassness, the barbarity of a planet which he had long despised, which he thenceforward renounced. Months later, the beautiful woman forced herself upon him where he, scornful recluse, sojourned on his yacht, spied the symbol pinned to his cabin wall, called him "baffling—but a dear" for keeping it, kissed him. He thereupon ceased to despise the planet.
Outside and Inside were two sides of that startling event—the collapse of Miss Aida Jenkinson, actress, on the night on which she was to have realized her life's ambition by appearing as Viola in Twelfth Night. Instead of being page to Duke Orsino, she put on an air signifying that Duke Orsino was page to her; she cut all other parts with mighty shears; she threw out her lines like strings of sausage out of a sausage machine. But on the great night itself, after splitting her green jacket up the back, Actress Jenkinson collapsed in a heap. The heap was a forlorn old woman.