To Tell You the Truth Author:Leonard Merrick General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: E.P. Dutton and Company Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where... more » you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE CELEBRITY AT HOME Before boarding-houses in London were all called Hotels and while snobbery had advanced no further than to call them Establishments, there was one in a London square where two of the " visitors " -- which is boarding-house English for " boarders " -- were a girl and a young man. Irene Barton was a humble journalist, who wrote stories when she would have been wiser to go to bed, and yearned to be an admired author. Jack Humphreys was an athletic clerk, who was renouncing clerkships for Canada and foresaw himself prospering in a world of wheat. The young man and the girl used to confide their plans to each other -- when they weren't saying how detestable all the other boarders were -- and before the time came for him to sail they had complicated matters by falling in love. When he had begged her to wait for him and she had explained that matrimony did not enter into her scheme of things, Miss Barton was miserable. But she did not let him guess that shewas1 miserable, and she didn't change her mind. She had dreamed of being a celebrated novelist from the days when she wrote stories, in penny exercise books, at the nursery table, and his appeal amounted to asking her to sacrifice her aspirations and remain a nobody. She had scoffed too often at women who " ruined their careers for sickly sentiment" to be guilty of the same blunder. Still, she had had no suspicion that sentiment could lure so hard, and she viewed the women more leniently now. She reflected that the experience of sickly sentiment at first hand should be of benefit to her fi...« less