Explore "Quicksands" by B.M. Croker on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is strange but true that my future lot was profoundly affected by the microbe of influenza. Influenza accomplishes various evils; this obnoxious germ carries weakness, depression and death, but it is rare to find it a medium that launches a young woman into the great wide world.
An excursion to London every January was one of the hard-and-fast rules of "The Roost"; about the middle of the month, when Christmas festivities had waned, the professor and his niece journeyed together to a boarding-house in Bayswater, and there enjoyed -- each in their own way -- a fortnight of the Metropolis. She, in attending sales and classical concerts, looking up old friends and going to "teas" arrayed in her best clothes. He, in personally worrying managers and dramatic agents, patronising theatres, telephoning incessantly, and giving expensive entertainments to needy professionals, who fed his insatiable vanity with enormous helpings of the sweetest flattery, and sent him back to his dull old den with a swollen head and a somewhat empty pocket.