Explore "A Little Girl in Tears" by Ellis Parker Butler on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The appetite for adventure grows by being fed. There was a night when Morley Smith, clubman and close to fifty years old, spurred by a chance book of fiction, let the check-boy at the club ease him into his eight-hundred-dollar fur-lined coat and sallied forth in a taxicab to seek adventure in a house chosen at random. Trivial as the adventure had been, it was a stirring event in Morley Smith's placid, well-groomed life. For a week he munched it in his mind and was satisfied. He glowed with a feeling that he had seen life. Then came the urge to further adventure.
When he had finished his ample dinner at the club, washed down by a half-pint of good sauterne (his favorite dinner-wine), Morley Smith had retired to the smoking-room, nothing farther from his mind than the thought of going out into the miserable, drizzly night. It was an excellent night on which to sit in drowsy comfort in the club, and he settled himself in a big chair, with a fat cigar and the daily paper. It may have been so slight a thing as a whispering of uneasiness in a region under his waistcoat where all was usually placid. Without knowing why, Morley Smith felt a vague discontent. He tossed the newspaper onto the table.