William Somerset Maugham

Lady Kelsey's drawing room in Mayfair. At the back is a window leading on to a balcony. On the right, a door leads to the staircase, and on the left is another door. It is the sumptuous room of a rich woman. Lady Kelsey is seated, dressed in black; she is a woman of fifty, kind, emotional, and agitated. She is drying her eyes. Mrs. Crowley, a pretty, little woman of twenty-eight, very beautifully dressed, vivacious and gesticulative, is watching her...

Drawing-room of the Hotel Splendide at Monte Carlo. A large, handsomely furnished room, with doors right and left, and French windows at the back leading to a terrace. Through these is seen the starry southern night. On one side is a piano, on the other a table with papers neatly laid out on it. There is a lighted stove. Lady Mereston, in evening dress, rather magnificently attired, is reading the papers. She is a handsome woman of forty. She puts...

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. Table of Contents: A Man of Honour (1903) Lady Frederick (1912) The Explorer (1912) The Circle (1921) Caesar's...

The lounge and winter garden of the Grand Babylon Hotel. There are palms and flowers in profusion, and numbers of little tables, surrounded each by two or three chairs. Several people are seated, drinking coffee and liqueurs. At the back, a flight of steps leads to the restaurant, separated from the winter garden by a leaded glass partition and swinging doors. In the restaurant a band is playing.

The drawing-room at Kenyon-Fulton. It is a handsome apartment with large windows, reaching to the ground. On the walls are old masters whose darkness conceals their artistic insignificance. The furniture is fine and solid. Nothing is very new or smart. The chintzes have a rather pallid Victorian air. The room with its substantial magnificence represents the character of a family rather than the taste of an individual. It is night and one or two electric...

Table of Contents: A Man of Honour (1903), Lady Frederick (1912), The Explorer (1912), The Circle (1921), Caesar's Wife (1922), East of Suez (1922)

When her employer dies, leaving her penniless, Nora Marsh decides to make her home with her brother Edward (Johnston) in Canada. She cannot, however, get along with her sister-in-law Gertie and life becomes a hardship. The hired man Frank Taylor owns a farm of his own, but a storm has destroyed his crops and forced him to work. Shortly after Nora's arrival he leaves for his farm. Nora hears a remark that he intends to get a woman to be his wife and...

A drawing-room at Lord Francis Etchingham's house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. An Adam room, with bright chintzes on the furniture, photographs on the chimney-piece and the piano, and a great many flowers. There is an archway at the back, leading into another drawing-room, and it is through this that visitors are introduced by the butler. On the left is a large bow window, and on the right a door leading into the library.

The morning room in the Consular Agent's house at Cairo. The windows are Arabic in character and so are the architraves of the doors, but otherwise it is an English room, airy and spacious. The furniture is lacquer and Chippendale, there are cool chintzes on the chairs and sofas, cut roses in glass vases, and growing azaleas in pots; but here and there an Eastern antiquity, a helmet and a coat of mail, a piece of woodwork, reminds one of the Mussulman...

At the beginning of the play, the house-proud Arnold Champion-Cheney is dreading the first visit of his mother and her new husband, who left England for Italy under the shadow of a scandal after divorcing his father many years before. Arnold's wife, Elizabeth, is looking forward to meeting Lady Catherine, who she sees as a romantic figure for having sacrificed her social position in England for love.