As it is, my poor wife (if she _was_ my wife, a subject on which I intend to submit a monograph to a legal contemporary), my poor wife was almost provoking in what she forgot and what she remembered.
One day as my dear patient was creeping about the _patio_, she asked me if I saw _all_ the papers?
‘Well, look at them _all_, for who knows how many may be boycotted by the present Government? In a boycotted print you don’t know but you may miss an account of how some fellow was hanged for what I did. I believe two people can’t be executed for the same crime. Now, if any one swings for Sir Runan, _I_ am safe; but it might happen, and you never know it.’
Dear Philippa, ever thoughtful for others! I promised to read every one of the papers, and I was soon rewarded for the unparalleled tedium of these studies.
I HATE looking back and reading words which I have written when the printer’s devil was waiting for copy in the hall, but I fancy I have somewhere called this tale a confession; if not, I meant to do so. It has no more claim to be called a work of art than the cheapest penny dreadful. How could it?
It holds but two characters, a man and a woman.
All the rest are the merest supers. Perhaps you may wonder that I thus anticipate criticism; but review-writing is so easy that I may just as well fill up with this as with any other kind of padding.
My publisher insists on so many pages of copy. When he does not get what he wants, the language rich and powerful enough to serve his needs has yet to be invented.
But he struggles on with the help of a dictionary of American expletives.
However, we are coming to the conclusion, and that, I think, will waken the public up! And yet this chapter will be a short one. It will be the review of a struggle against a temptation to commit, not perhaps crime, but an act of the grossest bad taste.
To that temptation I succumbed; we both succumbed.
It is a temptation to which I dare think poor human nature has rarely been subjected.
The temptation to go and see a man, a fellow-creature, tried for a crime which one’s wife committed, and to which one is an accessory after the fact.
Breakfast was just oyer, the table with its relics of fragrant bloaters and _terrine_ of _paté_ still stood in the _patio_.