True enough, later on my love grew fainter. The fault was hers. My
experience, a tolerably wide one, teaches me that, when a man's love
does grow less, almost invariably the woman is at fault. The days went
by. The Honour of the Club remained in my pocket. I could not make up
my mind whom to choose. When it came to the scratch, I found the task
harder than I supposed. I thought of my scamp of a brother. Goodness
knows he would be all the better for killing. I might have pitched upon
him had not another choice been positively thrust upon me. None of
one's other relatives seemed worthy serious attention. The Depehurst
people are a nuisance. But one scarcely felt justified in killing one
of them, just by way of a joke, except it was Harold, who, what with
his temperance fad, and his anti-gambling fad, and his social purity
fad, and all the rest of his fads, is one of the most obnoxious prigs I
know. On the other hand, if one commenced killing men simply because
they were prigs, slaughter would know no ending.
Then Louise began to worry me. The usual story--her character at stake.
As though it mattered! But, try as I would, I could not induce her to
take my point of view. Never was a girl more unreasonable. I had always
foreseen that she was the sort with whom one might have trouble. But
then I had always supposed that she loved me. I made at least a dozen
suggestions--delicately, and almost inferentially, as it were, because
she was in a state of mind in which a slip on my part might have made
her dangerous. Nothing would do for her except that I should marry her,
which, of course, was absurd.
Then it happened. Up to the very last moment I was undecided. The fault
was hers all through.
She was staying in lodgings at Brighton--really at my expense. I had
enough expenses of that kind upon my hands just then! Her tenancy was
up on the Monday. I told her to leave instead on the Sunday. She was to
meet me at East Grinstead. She might have been under the impression
that, having met me, she was to stay with me--if so, again the fault
was hers. Leaving town early, I met her at East Grinstead Station. We
lunched at a tavern near the station. After lunch we walked over to
Turner's Hill. At the inn we had a hybrid sort of meal. Afterwards we
started, as she supposed, to walk back to East Grinstead Station.
In so supposing, she was wrong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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