دانلود کتاب The Circular Staircase

TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster
lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished
house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of
those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies
happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable;
for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the
carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown
linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after
watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet
in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply
does not depend on a tank on the roof. And then—the madness seized me.
When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I
survived at all. As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing
experiences. I have turned very gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only
yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make
my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of
unpleasant things and I snapped her off. “No,” I said sharply, “I’m not
going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either.” Liddy’s
nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has enough
left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a lump in
her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to Sunnyside, and
she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness,—from which you may
judge that the summer there was anything but a success