Project Gutenberg's Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days, by Arnold Bennett

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days

Author: Arnold Bennett

Release Date: February 2, 2004 [EBook #10911]
[Date last updated: January 9, 2005]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURIED ALIVE: A TALE OF THESE DAYS ***

Produced by John Hagerson, Kevin Handy and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

BURIED ALIVE
A Tale of These Days

BY
ARNOLD BENNETT

To
JOHN FREDERICK FARRAR
M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
MY COLLABORATOR
IN THIS AND MANY OTHER BOOKS
A GRATEFUL EXPRESSION
OF OLD-ESTABLISHED REGARD

CONTENTS

I. THE PUCE DRESSING-GOWN

II. A PAIL

III. THE PHOTOGRAPH

IV. A SCOOP

V. ALICE ON HOTELS

VI. A PUTNEY MORNING

VII. THE CONFESSION

VIII. AN INVASION

IX. A GLOSSY MALE

X. THE SECRET

XI. AN ESCAPE

XII. ALICE'S PERFORMANCES

CHAPTER I

_The Puce Dressing-gown_

The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic--
that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore
for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer.
The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away
from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington.
In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on the ground-floor and on the
first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity can outwit
nature's. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses between
South Kensington Station and North End Road. With its grimy stucco
front, its cellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect
inconvenience, and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of
sundry general servants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and
gloomily awaited the day of judgment for London houses, sublimely
ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even the
reckless flight of the whole solar system through space. You felt that
No. 91 was unhappy, and that it could only be rendered happy by a 'To
let' standard in its front patch and a 'No bottles'