Explore "The Murders in Praed Street" by John Rhode on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Mr. Richard Pargent's public was a very limited one. A few lines of type, of unequal length, would appear from time to time in one of the ultra-artistic magazines, and would be hailed by critics of the new school as yet another deadly blow at the shackles which have hitherto fettered the feet of the muse of poetry. The general public found them incomprehensible, which was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for Mr. Pargent's reputation.
But, in spite of Mr. Pargent's extreme literary modernity, his surroundings and circumstances were typically mid-Victorian. His age was between fifty and sixty, and he lived with his sister Clara in a tall, narrow house in Bavaria Square, Bayswater. It was, as a matter of fact, the house in which he and his two sisters had been born. On their parents' death he and Miss Clara Pargent had elected to remain where they were and keep house together. Miss Margaret, younger and more adventurous, had taken unto herself a companion -- of the female sex -- and migrated to a house in the little town of West Laverhurst, in Wiltshire.