Project Gutenberg 2025-06-29 Public domain in the USA. 269 Wharton, Edith 1862 1937 Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones Olivieri, David The children $aNew York :$bD. Appleton and company, $c1928. Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) The children by Edith Wharton is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows Martin Boyne, a middle‑aged engineer, who becomes entangled with the glamorous yet chaotic Wheater clan—especially teen caretaker Judith, her delicate twin Terry, and a volatile mix of full-, half-, and step‑siblings—while their wealthy parents drift between yachts and hotels. The story explores modern divorce and remarriage and the cost of adult caprice on children who are determined to keep themselves together. The opening of the novel finds Boyne on a cruise from Algiers, where he notices Judith minding a baby and a swarm of children and ends up sharing a cabin with her twin, Terry. Through Judith and the governess, Miss Scope, he learns the family tangle: the Wheater parents split and remarried disastrously (to a movie star and an Italian prince), then reunited; the brood now includes “steps” Bun, Beechy, and Zinnie alongside Judith, Terry, and Blanca, with baby Chip adored by the parents. A day trip to Monreale shows Judith’s flair for mothering even as high art leaves her cold, deepening Boyne’s interest. When Terry begs for an education, Boyne agrees to help, stays on to meet the parents in Venice, and secures a cultivated tutor, Gerald Ormerod. Over breakfast at the modest pension where the children stay, Judith refuses school for herself, vowing never to leave the tribe, and hints that Joyce may prefer to keep the tutor in Venice for her own amusement. The section closes with Boyne uncomfortably aware of adult currents swirling around the children he has begun to care about. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001029668 20240311132414wharton 1928 US Reading ease score: 80.6 (6th grade). Easy to read. en American fiction -- 20th century Stepchildren -- Fiction Middle-aged men -- Fiction Americans -- Europe -- Fiction Families -- Fiction Children of divorced parents -- Fiction Stepfamilies -- Fiction Bachelors -- Fiction PS Text Category: Novels Category: American Literature 654670 2025-07-30T08:05:36.496489 text/html 629348 2025-06-29T19:29:21 text/html 538480 2025-07-30T08:05:46.222435 application/epub+zip 544068 2025-07-30T08:05:38.715460 application/epub+zip 437908 2025-07-30T08:05:37.471440 application/epub+zip 1235988 2025-07-30T08:05:51.846422 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1192019 2025-07-30T08:05:45.089433 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 584491 2025-07-30T08:05:35.288553 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 564649 2025-06-29T19:29:21 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 15964 2025-07-30T08:05:52.021379 application/rdf+xml 14456 2025-07-30T08:05:37.881462 image/jpeg 1496 2025-07-30T08:05:37.713427 image/jpeg 1412906 2025-07-30T08:05:36.560534 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog fr.wikipedia en.wikipedia