E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team VICTORIAN SHORT STORIES Stories of Courtship CONTENTS ANGELA, An Inverted Love Story, by William Schwenk Gilbert THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER OF OXNEY COLNE, by Anthony Trollope ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTSHIP, by Hubert Crackanthorpe A LITTLE GREY GLOVE, by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita [Dunne] Bright) THE WOMAN BEATER, by Israel Zangwill ANGELA An Inverted Love Story By William Schwenk Gilbert (_The Century Magazine_, September 1890) I am a poor paralysed fellow who, for many years past, has been confined to a bed or a sofa. For the last six years I have occupied a small room, giving on to one of the side canals of Venice, and having no one about me but a deaf old woman, who makes my bed and attends to my food; and there I eke out a poor income of about thirty pounds a year by making water-colour drawings of flowers and fruit (they are the cheapest models in Venice), and these I send to a friend in London, who sells them to a dealer for small sums. But, on the whole, I am happy and content. It is necessary that I should describe the position of my room rather minutely. Its only window is about five feet above the water of the canal, and above it the house projects some six feet, and overhangs the water, the projecting portion being supported by stout piles driven into the bed of the canal. This arrangement has the disadvantage (among others) of so limiting my upward view that I am unable to see more than about ten feet of the height of the house immediately opposite to me, although, by reaching as far out of the window as my infirmity will permit, I can see for a considerable distance up and down the canal, which does not exceed fifteen feet in width. But, although I can see but little of the material house opposite, I can see its reflection upside down in the canal, and I take a good deal of inverted interest in such of its inhabitants as show themselves from time to time (always upside down) on its balconies and at its windows.