POST SCRIPTUM
A TERRIBLE thing has happened.
Finished a week ago and the invitations to come and listen already in the post, with the flat being cleaned in preparation and beer and sandwiches almost, as it were, on the threshold, I have been obliged to take my manuscript once more out of the locked drawer which conceals it from Edelgard’s eyes in order to record a most lamentable occurrence.
My wife received a letter this morning from Mrs. Menzies-Legh informing her that Frau von Eckthum is about to be married to Jellaby.
No words can express the shock this has given me. No words can express my horror at such a union. Left to herself, helpless in the clutches of her English relatives, the gentle creature’s very virtues—her pliability, her tender womanliness—have become the means of bringing about the catastrophe. She was influenced, persuaded, a prey. It is six months since she was handed over entirely to the Menzies-Leghs, six months of no doubt steady resistance, ending probably in her health breaking down and in her giving in. It hardly bears thinking of. A Briton. A Socialist. A man in flannel. No family. No money. And the most terrible opinions. My shock and horror are so great, so profound, that I have cancelled the invitations and will lock this up perhaps forever, certainly for some weeks; for how could I possibly read aloud the story of our harmonious and delightful intercourse with the tragic sequel public knowledge?
And my wife, when she read the letter at breakfast, clapped her hands and cried, “Isn’t it splendid—oh, Otto, aren’t you glad?”
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
It it had not been=> If it had not been {pg 7}