This novel is from 1917.
About the author:
British novelist, critic, and dramatist, a natural storyteller with a fine flow of words and romantic invention.
.....from britannica.com
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
...summary from wikipedia
Excerpt from the book:
Inside the house at about half-past four, upon this after-
noon November 8th, in the year 1902, young Henry Trench-
ard was sitting alone; he was straining his eyes over a book
that interested him so deeply that he could not leave it in
order to switch on the electric light; his long nose stuck into
the book's very heart and his eyelashes almost brushed the
paper. The drawing-room where he was had caught some
of the fog and kept it, and Henry Trenchard's only light was
the fading glow of a red cavernous fire. Henry Trenchard,
now nineteen years of age, had known, in all those nine-
teen years, no change in that old drawing-room. As an
ugly and tiresome baby he had wailed before the sombre
indifference of that same old stiff green wall-paper — a little
brighter then perhaps, — had sprawled upon the same old
green carpet, had begged to be allowed to play with the same
collection of little scent bottles and stones and rings and
miniatures that lay now, in the same decent symmetry, in the
same narrow glass-topped table over by the window. It was
by shape and design a heavy room, slipping into its true
spirit with the London dusk, the London fog, the London
lamp-lit winter afternoon, seeming awkward, stiff, almost af-
fronted before the sunshine and summer weather. One or
two Trenchards — two soldiers and a Bishop — were there in
heavy old gold frames, two ponderous glass-fronted book-
cases guarded from any frivolous touch high stiff-backed vol-
umes of Gibbons and Eichardson and Hooker.
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Be sure to look for other novels by Sir Walpole for your Kindle:
- The Thirteen Travelers
- The Young Enchanted, a romantic story
- The Duchess of Wrexe
- Maradick at Forty, a transition
- The Gods and Mr. Perrin, a tragi-comedy
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