I stopped and laughed at
myself at a street corner a minute together, laughing out loud, so
that a passenger looked at me, which brought me to myself.
"Well," I thought, "I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy
long enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have
nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man
in the beginning and will be so to the end. God knows I was happy
enough before ever I saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again
when I have seen the last of her."
That seemed to me the chief affair: to see them go. I dwelled
upon the idea fiercely; and presently slipped on, in a kind of
malevolence, to consider how very poorly they were likely to fare
when Davie Balfour was no longer by to be their milk-cow; at which,
to my very own great surprise, the disposition of my mind turned
bottom up. I was still angry; I still hated her; and yet I thought
I owed it to myself that she should suffer nothing.
This carried me home again at once, where I found the mails drawn
out and ready fastened by the door, and the father and daughter
with every mark upon them of a recent disagreement.
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