A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
Over lunch at the Carlton, Reginald turns a duchess’s moral observations into a survey of social hypocrisy.
A woman makes truth-telling a habit and discovers how quickly honesty can empty a visiting list.
Reginald explains the hazards of house parties, from unknowable hosts to shooting etiquette and dangerous dinner conversation.
Reginald avoids the tariff debate by applying protectionism to card partners, houseguests, and everyone who takes life seriously.
Trapped at a joyless Christmas house party, Reginald answers worthy games and Old English revelry with inventions of his own.
Reginald composes a peace poem by rhyme, fashion, and biscuit tin, while facts and meaning wait their turn.
Reginald’s attempt at fashionable verse moves from wounded wombats to Persian eggs and an album its owner may regret.
Vera's local almanac predicts the obvious, until one stubborn forecast needs Clovis to make it come true.
A young Russian’s mysterious game bag hangs over tea while a fox-hunting major waits below for better news.
A traveler confides how his tyrannical aunt vanished—and why her family paid kidnappers to keep her away.
A bargain hunter brings her dreamy nephew to a department-store sale and learns that he has his own idea of commerce.
To remove a romantic rival, Clovis convinces a protective hostess that her prized buzzards are in danger.
A clairvoyant hunting a respectable family ghost sees something far less convenient for her hosts.
Clovis must remove an unbudgeable houseguest before her enemy arrives, so he invents a butler with one dangerous delusion.
A rumored book of indiscreet memoirs makes Reginald the target of friends anxious to erase—or improve—their pasts.
A condemned man explains how an impulsive change of clothes made him a suspect in his own murder.
A weary candidate is promised a night without politics, but a supposed flood fills his bedroom with livestock and alarm.
Punished for proving the adults wrong, a sharp-eyed boy turns an afternoon of exclusion into a private campaign of discovery.
A mouse inside a fastidious traveler’s clothes forces an impossible choice in a railway compartment shared with a sleeping woman.
A timid English traveler stranded in a snowbound railcar must rely on a calm peasant woman whose confidence comes at a price.
Facing lunch with a boastful rival, a woman rents a garden grand enough to silence her—and needs a story when the scenery vanishes.
A nervous visitor hears why his hostess keeps a window open—and then sees the impossible approaching across the lawn.
A cheerful rider stops at a lonely house and offers hope to a proud family whose silence conceals a different kind of loss.
A city-weary lodger seeks peace on a remote farm, only to find its quiet ruled by two old women’s vindictive spells.
