The Cruise of the Make-Believes
1907
In a cramped New York tenement, a young woman named Bessie Meggison has built a wooden ship in her backyard scrapheap and steers it daily on imaginary voyages. This is not childhood whimsy but hard-won survival: the cruise of the make-believe is how she endures her dreary life with a worthless father and the suffocating poverty of Arcadia Street. When the wealthy Gilbert Byfield moves in next door, a writer researching the poor for his next book, he stumbles upon Bessie's secret kingdom. He is enchanted by her resilience, her dreams, her stubborn insistence on beauty amid squalor. What begins as anthropological curiosity becomes something deeper. Through a well-meaning deception, Bessie and her family are whisked to Gilbert's country estate, where she believes her father's fortune has finally turned. The bubble bursts when she learns the truth, and she returns to the slums wounded. But Gilbert, to his credit, comes after her. The question that lingers: can imagination survive contact with reality, and can love transcend the unbridgeable distance between a tenement and an estate?
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Cruise of the Make-Believes by Tom Gallon free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Cruise of the Make-Believes by Tom Gallon free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266Cite this book
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Gallon, Tom. The Cruise of the Make-Believes. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266.Gallon, T. (1907). The Cruise of the Make-Believes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266Gallon, Tom. The Cruise of the Make-Believes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-cruise-of-the-make-believes-1961a65e-841a-4871-a46f-a4ef87d1f266.
