Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ...lengths, precisely, as affect one as so 'rum, ' hasn't also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on." "Ah, there you are! It's the question that I've all along been asking myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued--she let him have it straight. "And it's the question of an idiot." "An idiot--?" "Well, the idiot that I've been, in all sorts of ways--so often, of late, have I asked it. You're excusable, since you ask it but now. The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face." "Then what in the world is it?" "Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him--the very passion of her brave little piety. That's the way it has worked," Mrs. Assingham explained--"and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a way as possible. But it has been working from a rum start. From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced--!" With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug. "I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That was a rum start." But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense, for a moment, intolerable. "Yes--there I am! I was really at the bottom of it," she declared; "I don't know what possessed me--but I planned for him, I goaded him on." With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. "Or, rather, I do know what possessed me--for wasn't he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn't he, quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn't he, quite charmingly, show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie," she thus lucidly continued, "couldn't, with a...