Read "The Step on the Stair" by Anna Katharine Green online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
My uncle, Edgar Quenton Bartholomew, was a man in a thousand. In everything he was remarkable. Physically little short of a giant, but handsome as few are handsome, he had a mind and heart measuring up to his other advantages.
Had fortune placed him differently -- had he lived where talent is recognized and a man's faculties are given full play -- he might have been numbered among the country's greatest instead of being the boast of a small town which only half appreciated the personality it so ignorantly exalted. His early life, even his middle age I leave to your imagination. It is of his latter days I would speak; days full of a quiet tragedy for which the hitherto even tenor of his life had poorly prepared him.