Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
"Now, how unhandsome life is!" I broke out, at one point on our way home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then dropped it, and then taken it up again. "It's so graceless, so tasteless! Why didn't Tedham die before the expiration of his term and solve all this knotty problem with dignity?
Hasketh had then spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."
You have got to reckon with the world at large." "I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?" Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?" Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee.
Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital.
"That is so," I assented, "but Tedham has made a lot lately in real estate, they say, and I don't know what better he could do with his money; or, I don't believe he does." We said no more, but we both felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was afterward not always sure that it was.
By this time I expected to do no less, but I was so curious to see Tedham again that I should have been willing to do much worse, rather than forego my meeting with him. I hope that there was some better feeling than curiosity in my heart, but I will, for the present, call it curiosity.
He agreed with me, and as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply said, "It was unjust," and we parted.
Beyond them was the road, and after we had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter place, he began to speak again. "I thought," he said, "that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody." "We needn't dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham," I answered, as kindly as I could. "That was entirely my own affair."
"I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not, have you?" "No," Tedham admitted. "Well, then, sit down and listen." He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him.
She convinced me, perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking