Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MARY AND GEOFFREY Geoffrey Arden lived with his sister Mary in a little house, something between a survival and an eccentricity, that broke the line of Grayling Street which connected the Oxford Road with Upper Brook Street. The street's name was a mystery, but a slightly stimulating one, and they took a good deal of pleasure in the individuality of their house, standing back from the road in a quite appreciable garden, which was kept decent rather than gay. The house had a number, but you could find it without, which was something to be thankful for in a street generally uniform, and it had a stucco front and gables, a respectable amount of antiquity, some tradition of learned occupants, and low, rather quaint rooms. It was considered to suit the Ardens, and particularly Mary Arden, who was so full of sympathy for her fellow-creatures and so rarely got into line with them. It had seemed the obvious thing when Geoffrey joined the Herald, that she should come to keep house for him, for she was the only other unattached member of one of those families which for years seera almost impervious to change and then scatter and dissolve. Mary and Geoffrey had lived most of their lives in another ManChester suburb, and most of their education had been received in Manchester. They lived together as a matter of course, and yet each had doubts and reticences about it. They had sympathies and affections profoundly, and yet all sorts of tricks of reserve had grown between them. In the old days, the family had been a pretty voluble one, and the ardent young people had taken some pride in the exclusion of what they called sentimentality. Perhaps something had gone with it, and Geoffrey could recall with amusement disputations on pure tragedy, utilitarianism, or the survival of th...