Mistress Anne

Anne Warfield teaches forty children at the Crossroads school in Maryland and boards at Peter Bower’s lodge, a long low house by the river where well off old gentlemen come to hunt and fish. She has old Maryland blood and no money, and she tells her pupils there is dignity in service, holding to her great-uncle’s line that work is the one royal thing in our lives. Two arrivals stir the winter: Richard Brooks, a young doctor who returns home to build a country practice, and Geoffrey Fox, a magazine writer stalled partway through a novel who reads his pages aloud to her. Anne also takes in a solitary drake and names him Diogenes. Temple Bailey published this in 1917, a year before The Tin Soldier carried her onto the bestseller lists.