I went on down the
avenue, breathing like an exhausted swimmer. "I'll give her up!" I cried
aloud, so upset was I.
I am a man of impulse; but I have trained myself not to be a
_creature_ of impulse, at least not in matters of importance. Without
that patient and painful schooling, I shouldn't have got where I now am;
probably I'd still be blacking boots, or sheet-writing for some bookmaker,
or clerking it for some broker. Before I got to my rooms, the night air and
my habit of the "sober second thought" had cooled me back to rationality.
"I want her, I need her," I was saying to myself. "I am worthier of her
than are those mincing manikins she has been bred to regard as men. She is
for me--she belongs to me. I'll abandon her to no smirking puppet who'd
wear her as a donkey would a diamond. Why should I do myself and her an
injury simply because she has been too badly brought up to know her own
interest?"
And now I see all the smooth frauds, all the weak people who never have
purposes or passions worthy of the name, all the finicky, finger-dusting
gentry with the "fine souls," who flatter themselves that their timidity is
the squeamishness of superior sensibilities--I see all these feeble folk
fluttering their feeble fingers in horror of me.
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