Indian Summer

Theodore Colville is forty-one, unmarried, and back in Florence, the city where a woman turned him down twenty years earlier. William Dean Howells built his 1886 comedy of manners around that awkward return. Adrift after selling his Indiana newspaper, Colville drifts into the company of Mrs. Lina Bowen, an old acquaintance, and finds himself half in love with her young ward, Imogene Graham, who is barely out of girlhood. What follows is a gently ironic study of self-deception, age, and the difference between sentiment and genuine feeling. Howells writes with a light touch and a sharp eye for the American expatriate set. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings one of his warmest novels back within easy reach.