He was as little able,
during the early stages of his meditations, to say where he was
hurt most as a man who had been stabbed in the back, bitten in the
ankle, hit in the eye, smitten with a blackjack, and kicked on the
shin in the same moment of time. All that such a man would be able
to say with certainty would be that unpleasant things had happened
to him; and that was all that Bill was able to say.
Little by little, walking swiftly the while, he began to make a
rough inventory. He sorted out his injuries, catalogued them. It
was perhaps his self-esteem that had suffered least of all, for he
was by nature modest. He had a savage humility, valuable in a
crisis of this sort.
But he looked up to Claire. He had thought her straight. And all
the time that she had been saying those things to him that night
of their last meeting she had been engaged to another man, a fat,
bald, doddering, senile fool, whose only merit was his money.
Scarcely a fair description of Mr Pickering, but in a man in
Bill's position a little bias is excusable.
Bill walked on. He felt as if he could walk for ever. Automobiles
whirred past, hooting peevishly, but he heeded them not. Dogs
trotted out to exchange civilities, but he ignored them. The
poison in his blood drove him on.
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