文档介绍：THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE
THE CIRCULAR
STAIRCASE
By MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
1
THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE
CHAPTER I
I 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 fortable; 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 es 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 ess.
The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and plete--one of
them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the
thing happened--that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson,
the detective, said himself he could never hav