A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
A wealthy lover tries to settle an adulterous triangle with cash, only to discover that affection cannot be bought.
A married woman tries to end a friend’s pursuit, only to discover that her principles are less secure than his attention makes them seem.
On a Black Sea steamer, a disillusioned landowner recounts how his worship of a beautiful neighbor drew him across Europe.
A dressmaker’s daughter shops for trimmings while a devoted clerk warns that the student she loves may never treat her as an equal.
A landowner confides his fear that ordinary life is incomprehensible, unaware that his closest friend desires his wife.
A society hostess dazzled by artistic celebrity overlooks the quiet distinction of the doctor she has married.
A sick doctor finds a telegram that confirms his wife’s affair and tries to release them both from a ruined marriage.
Newly married to a wealthy older colonel, a young woman remains fixated on the indifferent friend she once hoped to marry.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
A major turns military discipline on an entire fortified town for the sake of one forbidden meeting with a married woman.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
A devoted widower pours all his love into the son his wife left behind, until an angry servant voices what the whole town knows.
Two homesick Breton soldiers share every Sunday—until a cowgirl’s kindness divides them.
A sheltered young wife befriends the woman named in an anonymous warning about her husband—and trusts them both.
A poor scholarship student makes one accidental movement during an exam and must decide whether winning matters more than his principles.
On a carefully cultivated tour of Rome, a refined schoolteacher meets an ideal companion—until one social detail tests her affection.
An ironmaster invites his wife’s lover on a midnight tour of the furnaces, where every display of heat carries a threat.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
A woman in a remote Klondike cabin waits for Dave Walsh, and a visitor's guide knows why he has not come.
A New Orleans agent visits a Louisiana plantation and grows close to a woman already engaged to a local painter.
At a Cajun ball, a farmer watches the woman he loves draw the attention of a wealthy planter.
