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A BACHELOR’S COMEDY
A BACHELOR’S COMEDY
CHAPTER I
This was no comedy to those most concerned, of course, for comedy is like happiness—directly a person knows he is in it, he is out of it. Tragedy, on the other hand, can only touch those who do not take themselves seriously enough.
No man, however, could take himself more seriously than did the Reverend Andrew Deane as he travelled down alone in a third-class railway carriage to his new living of Gaythorpe-on-the-Marsh.
When the train neared Millsby, the station for Gaythorpe, he rose hastily and peered at the piece of looking-glass provided for self-conscious travellers. Yes, his worst fears were altogether justified. His hair curled in a stiff bush above his forehead, in spite of brilliantine applied at the very last moment before leaving his London lodgings. Why—he demanded desperately of himself—why had he not brought a bottle in his pocket?
For he considered curls not only undignified but unclerical. His sensitiveness on the subject had started at the age of six, when he still wore them rather long and other little boys called him “Annie”! He fought the other little boys and induced his mother to have his hair cut, but the wound remained and rankled.