Books with author ROBERT GRAVES

This short novella 'The Orchid' can be read as Robert Grant's commentary on the hypocrisy of American society in the garb of an amusing light novel. Written in 1905, this novel is about a headstrong young woman, who marries for money and divorces for love. She then sells her infant daughter back to her former husband to secure a two million dollar fortune.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Example in this ebookIncome.ogers, the book-keeper for the past twenty-two years of my friend Patterson, the banker, told me the other day that he had reared a family of two boys and three girls on his annual salary of two thousand two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the boys through college, one through the School of Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a librarian, given one a coming-out party and a trousseau, and that the remaining daughter, a home body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine of his own and his wife’s old age. All this on two thousand two hundred dollars a year.Rogers told me with perfect modesty, with just a tremor of self-satisfaction in his tone, as though, all things considered, he felt that he had managed creditably, yet not in the least suggesting that he regarded his performance as out of the common run of happy household annals. He is a neat-looking, respectable, quiet, conservative little man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank, invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year round, a narrow black necktie in winter, and a narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in summer, and whose watch is no less invariably right to a second. As I often drop in to see Patterson, his employer, I depend upon it to keep mine straight, and it was while I was setting my chronometer the other day that he made me the foregoing confidence.Frankly, I felt as though I had been struck with a club. It happened to be the first of the month. Every visit of the postman had brought me a fresh batch of bills, each one of which was a little larger than I had expected. I was correspondingly depressed and remorseful, and had been asking myself from time to time during the day why it need cost so much to live. Yet here was a man who was able to give his daughter a coming-out party and a trousseau on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I opened my mouth twice to ask him how in the name of thrift he had managed to do it, but somehow the discrepancy between his expenditures and mine seemed such a gulf that I was tongue-tied. “I suppose,” he added modestly, “that I have been very fortunate in my little family. It must indeed be sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless child.” Gratitude too! Gratitude and Shakespeare on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I went my way without a word.There are various ways of treating remorse. Some take a Turkish bath or a pill. Others, while the day lasts, trample it under foot, and shut it out at night with the bed-clothes. Neither course has ever seemed to me exactly satisfactory or manly. Consequently I am apt to entertain my self-reproach and reason with it, and when one begins to wonder why it costs so much to live, he finds himself grappling with the entire problem of civilization, and presently his hydra has a hundred heads. The first of the month is apt to be a sorry day for my wife as well as for me, and I hastened on my return home to tell her, with just a shadow of reproach in my tone, what Mr. Rogers had confided to me. Indeed I saw fit to ask, “Why can’t we do the same?”“We could,” said Barbara.“Then why don’t we?”“Because you wouldn’t.”I had been reflecting in the brief interval between my wife’s first and second replies that, in the happy event of our imitating Rogers’s example from this time forth and forever more, I should be able to lay up over five thousand dollars a year, and that five thousand dollars a year saved for ten years would be fifty thousand dollars—a very neat little financial nest egg. But Barbara’s second reply upset my calculation utterly, and threw the responsibility of failure on me into the bargain.To be continue in this ebook...

George Colfax was in an outraged frame of mind, and properly so. Politically speaking, George was what might be called, for lack of a better term, a passive reformer. That is, he read religiously the New York Nation, was totally opposed to the spoils system of party rewards, and was ostensibly as right-minded a citizen as one would expect to find in a Sabbath day’s journey. He subscribed one dollar a year to the civil-service reform journal, and invariably voted on Election Day for the best men, cutting out in advance the names of the candidates favored by the Law and Order League of his native city, and carrying them to the polls in order to jog his memory. He could talk knowingly, too, by the card, of the degeneracy of the public men of the nation, and had at his finger-ends inside information as to the manner in which President This or Congressman That had sacrificed the ideals of a vigorous manhood to the brass idol known as a second term. In fact, there was scarcely a prominent political personage in the country for whom George had a good word in every-day conversation. And when the talk was of municipal politics he shook his head with a profundity of gloom which argued an utterly hopeless condition of affairs—a sort of social bottomless pit. And yet George was practically passive. He voted right, but, beyond his yearly contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time fascinating—an alluring combination to the sex which always likes a moral frame for its fancies. It was to a woman that George was unbosoming his distress on this particular occasion, and, as has been already indicated, his indignation and disgust were entirely justified. Her name was Miss Mary Wellington, and she was the girl whom he wished with all his heart to marry. It was no hasty conclusion on his part. He knew her, as he might have said, like a book, from the first page to the last, for he had met her constantly at dances and dinners ever since she “came out” seven years before, and he was well aware that her physical charms were supplemented by a sympathetic, lively, and independent spirit. One mark of her independence—the least satisfactory to him—was that she had refused him a week before; or, more accurately speaking, the matter had been left in this way: she had rejected him for the time being in order to think his offer over. Meanwhile he had decided to go abroad for sixty days—a shrewd device on his part to cause her to miss him—and here he was come to pay his adieus, but bubbling over at the same time with what he called the latest piece of disregard for public decency on the part of the free-born voter. “Just think of it. The fellow impersonated one of his heelers, took the civil-service examination in the heeler’s name, and got the position for him. He was spotted, tried before a jury who found him guilty, and was sentenced to six months in jail. The day he was discharged, an admiring crowd of his constituents escorted him from prison with a brass band and tendered him a banquet. Yesterday he was chosen an alderman by the ballots of the people of this city. A self-convicted falsifier and cheat! A man who snaps his fingers in the face of the laws of the country! Isn’t that a commentary on the workings of universal suffrage?” This was a caustic summing up on George’s part of the story he had already told Miss Wellington piecemeal, and he looked at her as much as to ask if his dejection were not amply justified