Collected Stories by Gertrude Atherton is a collection of short stories about a woman whose husband was dying of illness in the back of a boarding house in New York, a young man meeting up with his childhood friend, and a Frenchman going to dinner with a family friend. Excerpt: “Her husband was dying, and she was alone with him. Nothing could exceed the desolation of her surroundings. She and the man who was going from her were in the third-floor-back of a New York boarding house. It was summer, and the other boarders were in the country; all the servants except the cook had been dismissed, and she, when not working, slept profoundly on the fifth floor.”
