Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE LITERARY SENSE [Illustration] THE LITERARY SENSE BY E. NESBIT AUTHOR OF "THE RED HOUSE" AND "THE WOULD-BE-GOODS" New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1903 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up, electrotyped, and published September, 1903. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO DOROTHEA DEAKIN WITH THE AUTHOR'S LOVE CONTENTS PAGE THE UNFAITHFUL LOVER 1 ROUNDING OFF A SCENE 13 THE OBVIOUS 29 THE LIE ABSOLUTE 49 THE GIRL WITH THE GUITAR 65 THE MAN WITH THE BOOTS 79 THE SECOND BEST 91 THE HOLIDAY 105 THE FORCE OF HABIT 123 THE BRUTE 147 DICK, TOM, AND HARRY 165 MISS EDEN'S BABY 187 THE LOVER, THE GIRL, AND THE ONLOOKER 209 THE DUEL 229 CINDERELLA 253 WITH AN E 275 UNDER THE NEW MOON 299 THE LOVE OF ROMANCE 309 THE LITERARY SENSE THE UNFAITHFUL LOVER SHE was going to meet her lover. And the fact that she was to meet him at Cannon Street Station would almost, she feared, make the meeting itself banal, sordid. She would have liked to meet him in some green, cool orchard, where daffodils swung in the long grass, and primroses stood on frail stiff little pink stalks in the wet, scented moss of the hedgerow. The time should have been May. She herself should have been a poem--a lyric in a white gown and green scarf, coming to him through the long grass under the blossomed boughs. Her hands should have been full of bluebells, and she should have held them up to his face in maidenly defence as he sprang forward to take her in his arms. You see that she knew exactly how a tryst is conducted in the pages of the standard poets and of the cheaper weekly journals. She had, to the full limit allowed of her reading and her environment, the literary sense. When she was a child she never could cry long, because she always wanted to see herself cry, in the glass, and then of course the tears always stopped. Now that she was a young woman she could never be happy long, because she wanted to watch her heart's happiness, and it used to stop then, just as the tears had.