About this book
What does the heart ask for when ambition and duty pull it in different directions?
In The Gay Cockade, Temple Bailey brings together short stories of youth, romance and the wish to make something of yourself. Young people face the pull between getting ahead and following the heart. Love, family and social duty give that question weight: what do you want, and what are you willing to choose?
A cockade is a knot of ribbon or a badge worn on a hat, a bright sign of loyalty, pride and youth. That image gives the collection its spirit. Bailey’s warm fiction offers a glimpse of early twentieth-century America through its manners, speech and hopes, with courtship and family close to the heart.
What you’ll discover
- Young hearts with ambitions Meet young people whose hopes for themselves sit alongside the claims of love.
- Duty beside desire Explore the tension between what the heart wants and what duty asks.
- Courtship and family ties Enter a world where romance belongs within a wider circle of family expectations.
- A glimpse of another time Discover the manners, speech and hopes that shape Bailey’s early twentieth-century American world.
- Warmth without a hurry Settle into old-fashioned storytelling that makes room for affection, ambition and quiet questions.
Who will love it
Readers who like romance with a wry smile, vivid clothes and candlelit rooms, and tales that end with a turn of the heart. Anyone who enjoys short stories in the old magazine style will feel at home.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Youth, ambition, and a wife's plan
- A play, a heroine, and a rival
- A Viking, a cloak, and a girl in gray
- The letter and the doubts of a modern girl
- The storm that brings Olaf back
- A dying wife, a soldier, and a husband
- Stage heroes and quiet gifts
- Love, money, and what people really need
Formats and delivery
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- Audiobook
- 9 h 46 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear La escarapela alegre in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
La escarapela alegre
by Temple Bailey · 1921
A poet in a Virginia farmhouse writes for a wife who loves his talent more than his youth.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
The Gay Cockade is a collection of short stories by Temple Bailey, an American writer whose work appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Scribner's, Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. The tales are set in the years around the First World War, in Washington, Virginia, Nantucket, California and the small towns between.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Youth, ambition, and a wife's plan
The first story, The Gay Cockade, is told by Miss Standish, a government clerk who has grown tired and gray. Into her office comes Jimmie Harding, young and swaggering, who wears his youth like a bright plume. The whole office borrows his color. When he falls in love with a girl named Elise, the clerks follow the romance as if it were a play.
Elise tells Jimmie he can write, and she tells him he must leave the Department. They marry in April and settle in his old two hundred year old house in Albemarle, Virginia. Elise scrubs it bare and fills it with candles, old books and mahogany. She will not even take a honeymoon, because Jimmie must first sit down at his desk in the little house that was once his grandfather's office.
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What is The Gay Cockade about?
It is a collection of short romantic stories by Temple Bailey. Each tale follows people in love, ambition or doubt, such as a poet and his driven wife, a woman drawn to a Viking-like yachtsman, and a dying wife choosing between two men.
What does the title The Gay Cockade mean?
A cockade is a bright knot of ribbon worn on a hat. In the title story, a young clerk named Jimmie Harding wears his youth like one, and the narrator suggests the name for his play.
Who is Sandwich Jane?
She is Jane, a red haired girl in the oil town of Tinkersfield, California, who sells homemade sandwiches to support her sick mother. She meets O-liver Lee, a bareheaded philosopher on fifteen dollars a week, and helps him in a town election.
More by Temple Bailey
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