The island of surprise Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE SYMPATHETIC MASTERPIECE MISS DOROTHY ARDEN'S condition differed widely from that of Mr. Robert Lovell. For one thing, while he enjoyed prett... more »y much everything that money could buy, she had an independence denied him since she earned her money and he only received his. Had she but known it, that meant all the difference in the world. Some inquiry into her antecedents is naturally in order. She was not born of poor but honest parents; on the contrary! By this the integrity of the parents is not impugned, only their financial status. Dorothy Arden had felt the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Although she had boldly met the attack with an advanced shield and armor of proof, the arrows had pierced and hurt, and in some of the wounds they still rankled. Father, mother, money, friends, all gone in one fell swoop of daring yet disastrous speculation with its attendant consequences, she had withdrawn herself immediately from her world and had made for herself a new place in a new world, since humanity cannot live disembodied and without material environment. She had been educated in a most expensive and entirely impractical way. When she sought to turn her training into money she found it comparatively worthless. With the slender financial remnants that had been left her after her father's suicide and her mother's death, she fitted herself to be a stenographer. Finishing her course at the business school, with the diploma of the institution as her recommendation, and saying nothing about her college degree in philosophy, literature, art, and kindred subjects, she presented herself at the Lovell offices, where her name gained her access to the head. Now the battle which her father had lost had been waged against Godfrey Lovell. It would be wrong to say ...« less