Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Flaw in the Crystal
    The Flaw in the Crystal
    The Flaw in the Crystal
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    The Flaw in the Crystal

    By May Sinclair

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateApr 29, 2009
    The Flaw in the Crystal
    Author

    May Sinclair

    Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863-1946) was a British writer and suffragist who wrote under the pseudonym of May Sinclair. Both a successful writer and important literary critic, Sinclair supported herself and her mother. She was a prominent critic of modernist poetry and prose, and has been credited for being the first to use “stream of consciousness” in a literary context. Sinclair was very socially active, advocating for scientific advancements and participating in suffrage movements. She often included feminist themes in her work, encouraging discussion on the social disadvantages forced on women. After her death in 1946, Sinclair left behind a legacy of innovative literary critiques, impactful activism, and a vast literary canon.

    Read more from May Sinclair

    Related to The Flaw in the Crystal

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ursula K. Le Guin

      Jun 15, 2018

      He was thinking of Lookfar, abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. As he drifted near sleep he began to remember sailing t

      15 min read

    • Article

      Left To Lose

      Jul 10, 2022

      Around the time she gives up her name, it starts to feel like this entire revolution isn’t worth it anymore. The world is probably lucky that Kelian—she still remembers Kelian, in spite of everything—is there to pick up the pieces, the way he always

      11 min read

    • Article

      Cast Out

      Jul 10, 2021

      Verity pushed back the quilts, rolled off her straw mattress onto the floor, felt for the poker, and stirred the ashes. The embers glowed. She wouldn’t have to go fire-borrowing again. Her chilled hands were clumsy. One glowing bit of wood rolled fro

      21 min read

    • Article

      Safety

      Mar 1, 2023

      IT WAS only a dream, a bad dream, and nothing else. The man in Vidal’s dream was stalking a woman, spying on her from the shadows, following her down a dark alley as she sought refuge from a downpour. The woman was vaguely familiar to Vidal, though h

      13 min read

    • Article

      Eating the Fruit

      Sep 12, 2017

      Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a fe

      4 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Play Dead

      Mar 3, 2020

      There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky,

      17 min read

    • Article

      From ESTRANGEMENT

      May 1, 2022

      From ESTRANGEMENT
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Witch Finders

      Jul 16, 2020

      Beth pulled her cloak tightly around her. It was the very last day of October and the air was damp and chill. Dead autumn leaves lay in deep piles in the woods and smoke curled into the night air from her cottage. Not far to go now. She bent her head

      4 min read

    • Article

      O Fortuna, Velut Luna

      Sep 15, 2018

      What is Miss Treece’s trouble, according to a popular notion? The man A has failed to show up. Arousing herself at the restaurant, she fixes her lipstick when her solo supper concludes and takes herself down the stairs situated behind the bar. There,

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Bridle

      Oct 10, 2021

      Saliva pooled on her tongue beneath the rusty depressor. She endured a constant urge to swallow, afraid of choking on her own fluids. The taste of metal and blood are so akin, it is easy to mistake one for the other. This early in the day, blood was

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Prayer

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Lost Prayer
      10 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      Elsi, The Strange Maid

      Aug 29, 2018

      Elsi, The Strange Maid
      17 min read

    • Article

      The Only Rule

      Jul 13, 2020

      There is only one rule in polite English society, but it is iron clad. Of course, polite English society is a fiction. For one thing, its members are rarely polite. Politeness is for the middle classes rather than those who live off ancestral acres o

      5 min read

    • Article

      DULCE DOMUM From The Wind In The Willows

      Nov 1, 2022

      DULCE DOMUM From The Wind In The Willows
      11 min read

    • Article

      THE BLACK SPIDER Part Two

      Oct 30, 2019

      THE BLACK SPIDER Part Two
      25 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Symmetry Of Ruby Margot

      Feb 6, 2020

      The Symmetry Of Ruby Margot
      10 min read

    • Article

      Milla’s Dandelion

      Sep 10, 2022

      The sun blinded Alchemilla as she entered the meadow. It was hidden deep in the forest, too deep for anyone to venture in without a reason. She didn’t mind the isolation, and if anything, it made her work easier. After her eyes adjusted, she took off

      12 min read

    • Article

      Excerpt

      Dec 12, 2019

      He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing. Not much space for it in the new home, just a few rooms lined up in a row, underneath a series of slow-moving ceiling fans, an array of antique clocks ticking on one wal

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Glove

      Mar 4, 2024

      The Glove
      8 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Black Spider

      Nov 28, 2019

      The Black Spider
      22 min read

    • Article

      THE Dark Light

      Oct 28, 2020

      THE Dark Light
      9 min read

    • Article

      Immaculate

      Nov 1, 2020

      Immaculate
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lost Children

      Aug 4, 2022

      Lost Children
      5 min read

    • Article

      Abandoned

      Jun 3, 2021

      Abandoned
      5 min read

    Reviews for The Flaw in the Crystal

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Flaw in the Crystal - May Sinclair

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Flaw in the Crystal, by May Sinclair

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Flaw in the Crystal

      Author: May Sinclair

      Release Date: April 26, 2009 [EBook #28615]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLAW IN THE CRYSTAL ***

      Produced by Suzanne Shell, Therese Wright and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      The Flaw in the Crystal

      By

      May Sinclair

      NEW YORK

      E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY

      31 West Twenty-Third Street

      Copyright, 1912

      By May Sinclair

      T was Friday, the day he always came, if (so she safeguarded it) he was to come at all. They had left it that way in the beginning, that it should be open to him to come or not to come. They had not even settled that it should be Fridays, but it always was, the week-end being the only time when he could get away; the only time, he had explained to Agatha Verrall, when getting away excited no remark. He had to, or he would have broken down. Agatha called it getting away from things; but she knew that there was only one thing, his wife Bella.

      To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was all that poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like Rodney Lanyon. Rodney's own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after ten years of Bella's. It had been understood for long enough (understood even by Bella) that if he couldn't have his weekends he was done for; he couldn't possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her.

      Of course, she didn't know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed, persistently, to realise any profound and poignant thing that touched him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie that held them.

      Sometimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would prove impossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her no forewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get a room in the village inn or at the Farm near by, and in Agatha's house he would find his place ready for him, the place which had become his refuge, his place of peace.

      There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was as if by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustments and arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber. She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scoured herself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire that he should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge she now had, that she could make him come.

      For if she had given herself up to that——

      But she never had; never since the knowledge came to her; since she discovered, wonderfully, by a divine accident, that at any moment she could make him—that she had whatever it was, the power, the uncanny, unaccountable Gift.

      She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably, how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what it might come to mean. It did mean that without his knowledge, separated as they were and had to be, she could always get at him.

      And supposing it came to mean that she could get at him to make him do things? Why, the bare idea of it was horrible.

      Nothing could well have been more horrible to Agatha. It was the secret and the essence of their remarkable relation that she had never tried to get at him; whereas Bella had, calamitously; and still more calamitously, because of the peculiar magic that there was (there must have been) in her, Bella had succeeded. To have tried to get at him would have been, for Agatha, the last treachery, the last indecency; while for Rodney it would have been the destruction of her charm. She was the way of escape for him from Bella; but she had always left her door, even the innermost door, wide open; so that where shelter and protection faced him there faced him also the way of departure, the way of escape from her.

      And if her thought could get at him and fasten on him and shut him in there——

      It could, she knew; but it need not. She was really all right. Restraint had been the essence and the secret of the charm she had, and it was also the secret and the essence of her gift. Why, she had brought it to so fine a point that she could shut out, and by shutting out destroy any feeling, any thought that did violence to any other. She could shut them all out, if it came to that, and make the whole place empty. So that, if this knowledge of her power did violence, she had only to close her door on it.

      She closed it now on the bare thought of his coming; on the little innocent hope she had that he would come. By an ultimate refinement and subtlety of honour she refused to let even expectation cling to him.

      But though it was dreadful to work her gift that way, to make him do things, there was another way in which she did work it, lawfully, sacredly, incorruptibly—the way it first came to her. She had worked it twenty times (without his knowledge, for how he would have scoffed at her!) to make him well.

      Before it had come to her, he had been, ever since she knew him, more or less ill, more or less tormented by the nerves that were wedded so indissolubly to Bella's. He was always, it seemed to her terror, on the verge. And she could say to herself, "Look at him now!"

      His abrupt, incredible recovery had been the first open manifestation of the way it worked. Not that she had tried it on him first. Before she dared do that once she had proved it on herself twenty times. She had proved it up to the hilt.

      But to ensure continuous results it had to be a continuous process; and in order to give herself up to it, to him (to his pitiful case), she had lately, as her friends said, cut herself completely off. She had gone down into Buckinghamshire and taken a small solitary house at Sarratt End in the valley of the Chess, three miles from the nearest station. She had shut herself up in a world half a mile long, one straight hill to the north, one to the south, two strips of flat pasture, the river

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1