And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and grey-faced, had made answer: “It’s her life that will be at stake.”
From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration.
And she would have to live through it—to suffer through an ordeal of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax—she knew it in a prescience that mercifully could not endure—would come in the ghastly dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold....
Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never know how it was that these things had become inevitable—had happened.
Dawlish, 1923.
THE BOND OF UNION
THE BOND OF UNION
(To A. P. D.)
A wide, cushioned seat runs round three sides of the deep fireplace in Torry Delorian’s library for the admitted reason that Lady Pamela March likes to face the room when she is talking.
The room, of course, means the audience. Personally, I consider that she could safely—I mean, without spoiling her picture of herself—make use of the very word itself. It is so obviously the only one that applies, when she sits there, smoking one cigarette after another, and we sit there, smoking one cigarette after another, all listening to Pamela, playing up to Pamela, and all more or less sexually attracted by Pamela.