The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories
by Gertrude Atherton

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Title: The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories

Author: Gertrude Atherton

Release Date: December 4, 2004 [EBook #14256]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: GERTRUDE ATHERTON]

The

Bell in the Fog

And Other Stories

By
Gertrude Atherton

Author of
"Rulers of Kings" "The Conqueror" etc.

New York and London
Harper & Brothers
Publishers :: 1905

To
The Master

Henry James

Contents

I. THE BELL IN THE FOG

II. THE STRIDING PLACE

III. THE DEAD AND THE COUNTESS

IV. THE GREATEST GOOD OF THE GREATEST NUMBER

V. A MONARCH OF A SMALL SURVEY

VI. THE TRAGEDY OF A SNOB

VII. CROWNED WITH ONE CREST

VIII. DEATH AND THE WOMAN

IX. A PROLOGUE (TO AN UNWRITTEN PLAY)

X. TALBOT OF URSULA

I

The Bell in the Fog

I

The great author had realized one of the dreams of his ambitious
youth, the possession of an ancestral hall in England. It was not so
much the good American's reverence for ancestors that inspired the
longing to consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic
appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the aristocratic aloofness
of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced,
generations and generations of the dead. To mere wealth, only his astute
and incomparably modern brain yielded respect; his ego raised its
goose-flesh at the sight of rooms furnished with a single check,
conciliatory as the taste might be. The dumping of the old interiors of
Europe into the glistening shells of the United States not only roused
him almost to passionate protest, but offended his patriotism--which he
classified among his unworked ideals. The average American was not an
artist, therefore he had no excuse for even the affectation of
cosmopolitanism. Heaven knew he was national enough in everything else,
from his accent to his lack of repose; let his surroundings be in
keeping.

Orth had left