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Within a Wall: A Short Story
Within a Wall: A Short Story
Within a Wall: A Short Story
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Within a Wall: A Short Story

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Previously published in the print anthology The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories.

Alan Everard, a successful modernist painter, is married to the beautiful society girl Isobel Loring, who eagerly promotes her husband's work. At one of her tea parties, to which she invites the London art critics, she unveils her husband's latest masterpiece—a portrait of herself. But Alan realizes the picture is lifeless. However, a sketch he has done of his daughter's godmother, Jane Haworth, is full of life and honesty. Alan soon discovers that the real contribution Jane has made to his life is not just her artistic judgment.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateNov 26, 2013
ISBN9780062302861
Within a Wall: A Short Story
Author

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in over 70 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 20 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

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    Within a Wall - Agatha Christie

    Contents

    Within a Wall

    About the Author

    The Agatha Christie Collection

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    WITHIN A WALL

    It was Mrs. Lemprière who discovered the existence of Jane Haworth. It would be, of course. Somebody once said that Mrs. Lemprière was easily the most hated woman in London, but that, I think, is an exaggeration. She has certainly a knack of tumbling on the one thing you wish to keep quiet about, and she does it with real genius. It is always an accident.

    In this case we had been having tea in Alan Everard’s studio. He gave these teas occasionally, and used to stand about in corners, wearing very old clothes, rattling the coppers in his trouser pockets and looking profoundly miserable.

    I do not suppose anyone will dispute Everard’s claim to genius at this date. His two most famous pictures, Colour, and The Connoisseur, which belong to his early period, before he became a fashionable portrait painter, were purchased by the nation last year, and for once the choice went unchallenged. But at the date of which I speak, Everard was only beginning to come into his own, and we were free to consider that we had discovered him.

    It was his wife who organized these parties. Everard’s attitude to her was a peculiar one. That he adored her was evident, and only to be expected. Adoration was Isobel’s due. But he seemed always to feel himself slightly in her debt. He assented to anything she wished, not so much through tenderness as through an unalterable conviction that she had a right to her own way. I suppose that was natural enough, too, when one comes to think of it.

    For Isobel Loring had been really very celebrated. When she came out she had been the

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