Love and Mr. LewishamWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Love and Mr. Lewisham
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Satire; Spiritualists -- England -- Fiction
"You pay it in," said Mr. Lucas Holderness, "if you've any doubts
about it. Pay it in. _I_ don't know the man or what he is. He may be a
swindler for all I can tell. _I_ can't answer for him. Pay it in and
see. Leave the change till then. I can wait. I'll call round in a few
days' time."
"All right, wasn't it?" said Mr. Lucas Holderness in a casual tone two
days later.
"Quite, sir," said his grocer with enhanced respect, and handed him
his four pounds thirteen and sixpence change.
Mr. Lucas Holderness, who had been eyeing the grocer's stock with a
curious intensity, immediately became animated and bought a tin of
salmon. He went out of the shop with the rest of the money in his
hand, for the pockets of his clothes were old and untrustworthy. At
the baker's he bought a new roll.
He bit a huge piece of the roll directly he was out of the shop, and
went on his way gnawing. It was so large a piece that his gnawing
mouth was contorted into the ugliest shapes. He swallowed by an
effort, stretching his neck each time. His eyes expressed an animal
satisfaction. He turned the corner of Judd Street biting again at the
roll, and the reader of this story, like the Lewishams, hears of him
no more.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE GLAMOUR FADES.
After all, the rosy love-making and marrying and Epithalamy are no
more than the dawn of things, and to follow comes all the spacious
interval of white laborious light. Try as we may to stay those
delightful moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no
returning, no recovering, only--for the foolish--the vilest peep-shows
and imitations in dens and darkened rooms. We go on--we grow. At least
we age. Our young couple, emerging presently from an atmosphere of
dusk and morning stars, found the sky gathering greyly overhead and
saw one another for the first time clearly in the light of every-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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