How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett PREFACE TO THIS EDITION This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book. I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of it--some of them nearly as long as the book itself--have been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however,
began with professional tact.
In one gasping breath the women started to explain their version of
the accident.
Barton, as dumb as the father, carried the girl directly to the bed
and put her down softly, half lying, half sitting, among the great
pile of night-crumpled pillows. Some one threw a blanket over her. And
above the top edge of that blanket nothing of her showed except the
grotesquely twisted turban, the whole of one white eyelid, the half of
the other, and just that single persistent trickle of red. Raspishly
at that moment the clock on the mantelpiece choked out the hour of
three. Already Dawn was more than half a hint in the sky, and in the
ghastly mixture of real and artificial light the girl's doom looked
already sealed.
Then very suddenly she opened her eyes and stared around.
"Eve!" gasped her father, "what have you been doing?"
Vaguely the troubled eyes closed, and then opened again. "I
was--trying--to show people--that I was a--rose," mumbled little Eve
Edgarton.
Swiftly her father came running to her side. He thought it was her
deathbed statement. "But Eve?" he pleaded. "Why, my own little girl.
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett PREFACE TO THIS EDITION This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book. I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of it--some of them nearly as long as the book itself--have been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however,