Login to ManoBook
Home / Young Adult / When a Man Marries
icon 0
icon TOP UP
rightIcon
icon Reading History
rightIcon
icon Sign out
rightIcon
icon Get the APP
rightIcon

Home

Genre

Ranking

Short Stories

When a Man Marries

When a Man Marries

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Young Adult | Completed
5.0
Comment(s)
105
View
23
Chapters

According to Wikipedia: "Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876-September 22, 1958) was a prolific author often called the American Agatha Christie.[1] She is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it", although she did not actually use the phrase herself, and also considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing.... Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues and special articles. Many of her books and plays, such as The Bat (1920) were adapted for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). While many of her books were best-sellers, critics were most appreciative of her murder mysteries. Rinehart, in The Circular Staircase (1908), is credited with inventing the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing. The Circular Staircase is a novel in which "a middle-aged spinster is persuaded by her niece and nephew to rent a country house for the summer. The house they choose belonged to a bank defaulter who had hidden stolen securities in the walls. The gentle, peace-loving trio is plunged into a series of crimes solved with the help of the aunt. This novel is credited with being the first in the "Had-I-But-Known" school."[3] The Had-I-But-Known mystery novel is one where the principal character (frequently female) does less than sensible things in connection with a crime which have the effect of prolonging the action of the novel. Ogden Nash parodied the school in his poem Don't Guess Let Me Tell You: "Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor." The phrase "The butler did it", which has become a cliché, came from Rinehart's novel The Door, in which the butler actually did do it, although that exact phrase does not actually appear in the work."

Chapter 23 COMING
08-13 19:27

When a Man Marries Chapter 1 AT LEAST I MEANT WELL

When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come and got in the papers and every one-but ourselves-laughed himself black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a coal shovel in one hand and a-well, perhaps it would be better to tell it all in the order it happened.

It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?

It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.

The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His art was a huge joke-except to himself. If he asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.

We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the Greuze women have long necks. I have not.

After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the Adirondacks and when he came back he came at once to see me. He seemed to think I would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no matter what she may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some time, and I was much calmer than he expected me to be.

"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella are-are in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will find that I stand it wonderfully."

He brightened perceptibly.

"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope we will always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don't care a whoop for me?"

"Absolutely," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about Bella; it was very tiresome.

Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him happiness-which was sincere enough, but hopeless-and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.

We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his letters to me. He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack, Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit. I wonder if I can make her happy?" Or-"Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?"

Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.

You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing "dearest Kit." And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!

There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard later-the situation would have been bad enough without that complication.

They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months. And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it. Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at the man who took her in, although it did not make him thin. Bella was flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were mentioned.

Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him-oh yes, she left him finally. She was intense enough about some things, and she said it got on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they asked for her husband. They would say, "Hello, Bella! How's Bubbles? Still banting?" And Bella would try to laugh and say, "He swears his tailor says his waist is smaller, but if it is he must be growing hollow in the back."

But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary of Bella's departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I say, I am very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and Bella had taken her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she didn't say. Whether the appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after box of flowers that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim who sent them.

To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg's to see the collection of antique furniture-mother was looking for a sideboard for father's birthday in March-and I met Jimmy there, boring into a worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the end of a match, and looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me he came over.

"I'm blue today, Kit," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Come and help me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a worm in every hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish business. It's a good business."

"Better than painting?" I asked. But he ignored my gibe and swelled up alarmingly in order to sigh.

"This is the worst day of the year for me," he affirmed, staring straight ahead, "and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over there. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!"

"See here, Jim," I said, leaning forward, "you're not well. You can't go through the rest of the day like this. I know what you'll do; you'll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won't eat any dinner." He looked guilty.

"Not Grieg," he protested feebly. "Beethoven."

"You're not going to do either," I said with firmness. "You are going right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for eight-that will be two tables of bridge. And you are not going to touch the pianola."

He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat, and stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair covered sofa.

"I wish to thunder I had married you!" he said savagely. "You're the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other-"

"Nothing of the sort," I said coldly, "and the fact that you didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow, I don't like you when you speak like that."

Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.

"I haven't been well," he said heavily. "Don't eat, don't sleep. Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"-he lowered his voice solemnly-"I have gained two pounds!"

I said he didn't look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.

That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.

During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn't cook-when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did-saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming-for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.

Continue Reading

Other books by Mary Roberts Rinehart

More
Where There's a Will

Where There's a Will

Literature

5.0

Though not exactly a mystery in the traditional sense, Mary Roberts Rinehart's Where There's a Will certainly has its fair share of intrigue, chicanery and deception. At stake is the ownership of Hope Springs, a family-owned health resort whose future appears uncertain in the aftermath of the longtime manager's demise. When a well-meaning group of employees band together to try to take matters into their own hands, all hell breaks loose.

The Street of Seven Stars

The Street of Seven Stars

Literature

5.0

Harmony Wells, studying in Vienna to be a great violinist, suddenly realizes that her money is almost gone. She meets a young ambitious doctor who offers her chivalry and sympathy, and together with world-worn Dr. Anna and Jimmie, the waif, they share their love and slender means.

The Man in Lower Ten

The Man in Lower Ten

Horror

5.0

The Man in Lower Ten (serialized in magazines in 1906) was published as a novel in 1910, and immediately rose to number four on the best-seller list. Combining murder, mystery, and romance, Rinehart's celebrated novel is sure to keep readers in delightful suspense. In order to pick up legal papers in another city, a young lawyer, Lawrence Blakely, must travel from Pittsburgh to Baltimore on what he expects to be an uneventful train ride. However the trip quickly becomes anything but boring; Blakely's papers are stolen, and his car bunk "lower ten" is occupied by a dead body. But that's not all Blakely finds himself in the middle of. He also grapples with a deadly train wreck, a ghostly haunting, and a sexy yet possibly dangerous love interest.

The Circular Staircase

The Circular Staircase

Fantasy

5.0

Mary Robert Rinehart unravels a story of a summerhouse rental gone dreadfully wrong in the popular 1908 thriller The Circular Staircase. With page-turning suspense, the tart-tongued Rachel Innes narrates the ghostly noises, suspicious deaths, troubling disappearances, mysterious origins, midnight prowlers, and stolen fortunes in this best-selling mystery. When The Circular Staircase appeared, Rinehart's humorous, modern take on the gothic was praised as a new style of mystery writing. Today, it is prominently included in lists of milestones in detective fiction. Together with Avery Hopwood, Rinehart recast part of the novel's plot for their smash-hit 1920 Broadway play The Bat, which was immortalized on the silver screen and influenced the genesis of comic-strip hero Batman.

Bab: A Sub-Deb

Bab: A Sub-Deb

Literature

5.0

Mary Roberts Rinehart was a prolific writer that is often referred to as the American Agatha Christie. Rinehart's mystery novels are still treasured by millions of readers today and she is the source of the famous phrase "The butler did it." Rinehart's most famous books include The Circular Staircase, The Bat, The Case of Jennie Brice, and The Door. Bab: A Sub-Deb is a humorous novel that is set during World War I. Bab, the title character, is a spoiled yet neglected second daughter from a rich family. The book is presented in the form of letters and diary entries.

A Poor Wise Man

A Poor Wise Man

Literature

5.0

Lily Cardew, returning home from doing Red Cross work during the war, finds herself feeling restless and unable to fit back into the familiar but rather empty social life of her wealthy family. Looking to occupy herself and to assert her independence from her harsh grandfather, she decides to visit an estranged family member, and ends up falling unwittingly into dangerous company among the leaders of an anarchist group. Meanwhile, her war companion, William Wallace Cameron, is drawn into the burgeoning political upheaval from the other end, and becomes a key figure in the movement working to stem the planned revolt.

You'll also like

The Surgeon's Vow: Healing My Billionaire Husband

The Surgeon's Vow: Healing My Billionaire Husband

Qing Shui
4.3

I sat in the gray, airless room of the New York State Department of Corrections, my knuckles white as the Warden delivered the news. "Parole denied." My father, Howard Sterling, had forged new evidence of financial crimes to keep me behind bars. He walked into the room, smelling of expensive cologne, and tossed a black folder onto the steel table. It was a marriage contract for Lucas Kensington, a billionaire currently lying in a vegetative state in the ICU. "Sign it. You walk out today." I laughed at the idea of being sold to a "corpse" until Howard slid a grainy photo toward me. It showed a toddler with a crescent-moon birthmark—the son Howard told me had died in an incubator five years ago. He smiled and told me the boy's safety depended entirely on my cooperation. I was thrust into the Kensington estate, where the family treated me like a "drowned rat." They dressed me in mothball-scented rags and mocked my status, unaware that I was monitoring their every move. I watched the cousin, Julian, openly waiting for Lucas to die to inherit the empire, while the doctors prepared to sign the death certificate. I didn't understand why my father would lie about my son’s death for years, or what kind of monsters would use a child as a bargaining chip. The injustice of it burned in my chest as I realized I was just a pawn in a game of old money and blood. As the monitors began to flatline and the family started to celebrate their inheritance, I locked the door and reached into the hem of my dress. I pulled out the sharpened silver wires I’d fashioned in the prison workshop. They thought they bought a submissive convict, but they actually invited "The Saint"—the world’s most dangerous underground surgeon—into their home. "Wake up, Lucas. You owe me a life." I wasn't there to be a bride; I was there to wake the dead and burn their empire to the ground.

Love's Sweetest Surprise: From Brokenhearted To Billionaire's Wife

Love's Sweetest Surprise: From Brokenhearted To Billionaire's Wife

Theo Montgomery
5.0

For five years, I believed I was living in a perfect marriage, only to discover it was all a sham! I discovered that my husband was coveting my bone marrow for his mistress! Right in front of me, he sent her flirtatious messages. To make matters worse, he even brought her into the company to steal my work! I finally understood, he never loved me. I stopped pretending, collected evidence of his infidelity, and reclaimed the research he had stolen from me. I signed the divorce papers and left without looking back. He thought I was just throwing a tantrum and would eventually return. But when we met again, I was holding the hand of a globally renowned tycoon, draped in a wedding dress and grinning with confidence. My ex-husband's eyes were red with regret. "Come back to me!" But my new groom wrapped his arm around my waist, and chuckled dismissively, "Get the hell out of here! She's mine now."

Get Back The Abandoned Luna

Get Back The Abandoned Luna

PENRELIEVER
4.0

The night I discovered my husband's whore was carrying his heir, I smiled for the cameras-and plotted his ruin. Scarlett was born a queen-heir to a powerful legacy, Luna of the Dark Moon Pack by blood and by sacrifice. She gave everything to Alexander: her love, her loyalty, her life. In return, he paraded his mistress before their pack... and dared to call it duty. But Scarlett won't be another broken woman weeping in the shadows. She'll wear her crown of thorns with pride, tear down every lie built around her, and when she strikes, it will be glorious. The Alpha forgot that the woman he betrayed is far more dangerous than the girl who once loved him.

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

Clara Bennett
5.0

I had just survived a private jet crash, my body a map of violet bruises and my lungs still burning from the smoke. I woke up in a sterile hospital room, gasping for my husband's name, only to realize I was completely alone. While I was bleeding in a ditch, my husband, Adam, was on the news smiling at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. When I tracked him down at the hospital's VIP wing, I didn't find a grieving husband. I found him tenderly cradling his ex-girlfriend, Casie, in his arms, his face lit with a protective warmth he had never shown me as he carried her into the maternity ward. The betrayal went deeper than I could have imagined. Adam admitted the affair started on our third anniversary-the night he claimed he was stuck in London for a merger. Back at the manor, his mother had already filled our planned nursery with pink boutique bags for Casie's "little princess." When I demanded a divorce, Adam didn't flinch. He sneered that I was "gutter trash" from a foster home and that I'd be begging on the streets within a week. To trap me, he froze my bank accounts, cancelled my flight, and even called the police to report me for "theft" of company property. I realized then that I wasn't his partner; I was a charity case he had plucked from obscurity to manage his life. To the Hortons, I was just a servant who happened to sleep in the master bedroom, a "resilient" woman meant to endure his abuse in silence while the whole world laughed at the joke that was my marriage. Adam thought stripping me of his money would make me crawl back to him. He was wrong. I walked into his executive suite during his biggest deal of the year and poured a mug of sludge over his original ten-million-dollar contracts. Then, right in front of his board and his mistress, I stripped off every designer thread he had ever paid for until I was standing in nothing but my own silk camisole. "You can keep the clothes, Adam. They're as hollow as you are." I grabbed my passport, turned my back on his billions, and walked out of that glass tower barefoot, bleeding, and finally free.

Once The Foolish Wife, Now His Eternal Obsession

Once The Foolish Wife, Now His Eternal Obsession

Calla Rhodes
4.6

For three years, Cathryn and her husband Liam lived in a sexless marriage. She believed Liam buried himself in work for their future. But on the day her mother died, she learned the truth: he had been cheating with her stepsister since their wedding night. She dropped every hope and filed for divorce. Sneers followed-she'd crawl back, they said. Instead, they saw Liam on his knees in the rain. When a reporter asked about a reunion, she shrugged. "He has no self-respect, just clings to people who don't love him." A powerful tycoon wrapped an arm around her. "Anyone coveting my wife answers to me."

Abandoned Wife, Billionaire Revenge

Abandoned Wife, Billionaire Revenge

Rabbit
4.5

My husband promised me forever, but gave me endless lies. On our anniversary, I found his secrets on social media, exposed by his mistress. He didn't just break my heart; he broke my entire world. Seraphina sat alone in her opulent mansion, preparing their anniversary dinner, feeling the suffocating weight of her cold, hollow marriage. An Instagram post from Tiffany Sloan then brazenly revealed Harrison's hand at a romantic dinner, shattering his flimsy excuses and exposing his blatant infidelity. The betrayal turned Seraphina's despair into cold resolve. He gaslighted her, dismissed her pain, and reminded her she was "nothing." He chose his mistress over her dying brother, caused her to break an ankle, and finally abandoned her on a desolate street corner, stripped of dignity. How could she have sacrificed her entire violin career for a man who so casually discarded her? Under that bridge, her foolish love died, leaving only a fierce desire for reclamation. Shivering and alone, a faded flyer for a violin teacher caught her eye. It was a defiant whisper of her old self, a promise: Seraphina Vanderbilt was gone, and a new Seraphina was finally free.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book
When a Man Marries When a Man Marries Mary Roberts Rinehart Young Adult
“According to Wikipedia: "Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876-September 22, 1958) was a prolific author often called the American Agatha Christie.[1] She is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it", although she did not actually use the phrase herself, and also considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing.... Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues and special articles. Many of her books and plays, such as The Bat (1920) were adapted for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). While many of her books were best-sellers, critics were most appreciative of her murder mysteries. Rinehart, in The Circular Staircase (1908), is credited with inventing the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing. The Circular Staircase is a novel in which "a middle-aged spinster is persuaded by her niece and nephew to rent a country house for the summer. The house they choose belonged to a bank defaulter who had hidden stolen securities in the walls. The gentle, peace-loving trio is plunged into a series of crimes solved with the help of the aunt. This novel is credited with being the first in the "Had-I-But-Known" school."[3] The Had-I-But-Known mystery novel is one where the principal character (frequently female) does less than sensible things in connection with a crime which have the effect of prolonging the action of the novel. Ogden Nash parodied the school in his poem Don't Guess Let Me Tell You: "Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor." The phrase "The butler did it", which has become a cliché, came from Rinehart's novel The Door, in which the butler actually did do it, although that exact phrase does not actually appear in the work."”
1

Chapter 1 AT LEAST I MEANT WELL

28/11/2017

2

Chapter 2 THE WAY IT BEGAN

28/11/2017

3

Chapter 3 I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN IT

28/11/2017

4

Chapter 4 THE DOOR WAS CLOSED

28/11/2017

5

Chapter 5 FROM THE TREE OF LOVE

28/11/2017

6

Chapter 6 A MIGHTY POOR JOKE

28/11/2017

7

Chapter 7 WE MAKE AN OMELET

28/11/2017

8

Chapter 8 CORRESPONDENTS' DEPARTMENT

28/11/2017

9

Chapter 9 FLANNIGAN'S FIND

28/11/2017

10

Chapter 10 ON THE STAIRS

28/11/2017

11

Chapter 11 I MAKE A DISCOVERY

28/11/2017

12

Chapter 12 THE ROOF GARDEN

28/11/2017

13

Chapter 13 HE DOES NOT DENY IT

28/11/2017

14

Chapter 14 ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE

28/11/2017

15

Chapter 15 SUSPICION AND DISCORD

28/11/2017

16

Chapter 16 I FACE FLANNIGAN

28/11/2017

17

Chapter 17 A CLASH AND A KISS

28/11/2017

18

Chapter 18 IT'S ALL MY FAULT

28/11/2017

19

Chapter 19 THE HARBISON MAN

28/11/2017

20

Chapter 20 BREAKING OUT IN A NEW PLACE

28/11/2017

21

Chapter 21 A BAR OF SOAP

28/11/2017

22

Chapter 22 IT WAS DELIRIUM

28/11/2017

23

Chapter 23 COMING

28/11/2017