Plays : Fourth Series

'Plays: Fourth Series' is a series of short plays written by John Galsworthy. Titles featured inside include 'A Bit O' Love', 'The Foundations', and 'The Skin Game'. The first story in the book is the play 'A Bit O'Love' which begins at Ascension Day in a village of the West. In the low paneled hall-sitting room of the Burlacombe's farmhouse on the village green, Michael Strangway, a clerical collar round his throat and a dark Norfolk jacket on his back, is playing the flute before a very large framed photograph of a woman, which is the only picture on the walls. His age is about thirty-five his figure thin and very upright and his clean-shorn face thin, upright, narrow, with long and rather pointed ears; his dark hair is brushed in a coxcomb off his forehead. A faint smile hovers about his lips that Nature has made rather full and he has made thin, as though keeping a hard secret; but his bright gray eyes, dark round the rim, look out and upwards almost as if he were being crucified. There is something about the whole of him that makes him seen not quite present. A gentle creature, burnt within.