Elfrida Bell feels stifled in her small hometown of Sparta, Illinois. All the townspeople, except her dear mother, expect poor Elfrida to marry and live her life as a housewife. Elfrida, however, has other plans. She's too smart to waste her talent in the home the way her mother did. And so she runs away to Europe hoping to find a career as a journalist.
Anna Karenina is the tragedy of married aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky.A bachelor, Vronsky is willing to marry her if she would agree to leave her husband Karenin, a government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, her own insecurities and Karenin's indecision. Despite Vronsky's reassurances she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, and eventually takes her own life.
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world.
The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures further south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean.
The peculiar conditions of East Indian society bring together Hilda Howe, a gifted actress of sensational play, and Laura Filbert, a salvation army captain. The salvation methods fall with the emotional actress, who , however, comes under the influence of an ascetic priest. The peculiar methods of an evangelistic and a roman catholic mission are described with wit and humour, and also the patho that made the adventures of a "Memsahib and his honour and a lady" so delightful.
Pasha, is an aging ingnue who is suddenly confronted by the slim, prim and intimidating wife of one of her legion of gift-bearing admirers. Out of guilt and sentimentality, Pasha accedes to the aggrieved wife's demand to return all of the gifts that her husband has given, although this unfaithful husband among the many has given her only two inexpensive items. The dozen stories in this collection also include "Rothschild's Fiddle,".a village undertaker who realizes too late what an angry..