"The Bridge."
A long narration by a twenty-two-year-old woman, in which she and her older sister vie for their boarder, the chief engineer of a bridge project. A review in The Spectator praised it as "a masterly short story...courageously conceived; to give the narration of this painful story of two sisters into the hands of the younger, the temporarily, ironically, victorious one, to keep the telling thus entirely within the egoistic and provincial limits of feminine mind and yet to thicken the whole fabric with its own inherent symbolism, its relation to scene and season, and to reveal in full the marked character of the victim-sister - both are victims - is a triumphant display of control." Bates's first novel, The Two Sisters, also involves two sisters, a suitor, and much natural symbolism, and ends with the sisters together again. In Horizon (January 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), The Beauty of the Dead and One Other Short Story (1941), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957). Reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1940, English and American (London: Cape, 1941), The Best British Short Stories, 1940 (1940), Argosy (March, 1941), Good Housekeeping (December 1946).