Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX Exultat1on filled me when I awoke late in the morning. Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the cool invigorating bath. Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted I was free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man? I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won! The children were mine! Alicia was mine! Would that I could bind them to me with triple brass. But I have bound them. In ridding myself of Pendleton, I had made them securely mine: Suppose he should return one day? They would be grown--reared by me. He would be merely the family skeleton. What is a family without a skeleton? He was that now. He wouldn't matter. It is human destiny to revolve about the child, about children. With the exception of Pendleton the outcast and Gertrude the--well, Gertrude--every one attained completeness only in rearing the next generation. And as I rubbed my body with the coarse towel I felt complete! As for Alicia--ah--well, who was I to expect from life everything? At any rate she was mine, now, even as the children were mine. And the very first thing I would do--oh, jeweled inspiration--is to adopt her, legally and formally. That thought suddenly made the blood sing in my ears to so delicious a tune that absurdly, ridiculously, I began like some pagan or satyr to dance about the room. Mine, mine, mine! I danced into the room in which Pendleton had not slept and with crazy gestures made as if...