Frivolities, Especially Addressed to Those Who Are Tired of Being SeriousMarsh, Richard
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Frivolities, Especially Addressed to Those Who Are Tired of Being Serious
Marsh, Richard
Fiction; Humorous stories, English; Short stories, English
I regret to have to write that Leila did not hesitate to suggest that
I had broken that toilet set on purpose. According to her it was all
part of my heartlessness and the hatred which I bore her. That I had
almost killed myself while hunting for the matches was nothing to her.
Nor did she pause to consider how I could have done it on purpose,
when, such was the Egyptian nature of the darkness, I did not even
know that the toilet set was there. We mopped the water up with the
towels. Then Leila knelt down and pieced the fragments of the toilet
set together as best she could, and continued to address me as if I
had been guilty, at the very least, of treason felony. When she
discovered that during my unfortunate search for those mislaid and
miserable matches I had also accidentally and quite unintentionally
visited the wardrobe, I thought that she would have thrown something
at me, even though she would have had to use as missiles pieces of the
broken ware.
It appeared that in dragging Leila's dresses off the hooks I had had
what one is bound to confess was the singular ill-fortune to tear
holes in most, if not in all of them. Insignificant holes they were
for the most part. Really hardly worth the mentioning, though you
would not have thought they were hardly worth the mentioning if you
had heard Leila. True, I had made rather a lengthy incision in the
back of her best silk, and ripped the waistband off her tailor-made;
but the rest of the garments were scarcely, that is to say, from my
point of view, not appreciably damaged. And when you consider that in
my agitation I had struggled as for my life in that death-trap of a
wardrobe, surely an allowance might have been made. Leila, however,
made absolutely none.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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