My whole thoughts were filled with her image. The difficulty of my position with regard to her and her mother likewise troubled me.
So, taking all these points into consideration, my office life was not a happy one,—though, if matters had been arranged more comfortably for me, touching the future, I would have cheerfully put up with more temporary annoyances than I actually suffered, slaving on indefinitely under Smudge’s rule.
As it was, I couldn’t.
I used to dream of Min all day, imagining what she might be doing down in the country.
I fancied all sorts of things about her.
I thought that she would forget me and like some one else better, knowing how joyfully Mrs Clyde would encourage any wooer whose presence might tend to make her turn from me.
The worst of it was, too, that I had no one to sympathise with me. I could not, exactly, go round asking people to “pity the sorrows of a disappointed lover!”
As Lamartine sings in his “Tear of Consolation”:—
“Qu’importe à ces hommes mes frères
Le coeur brisé d’un malheureux?
Trop au-dessus de mes misères,
Mon infortune est si loin d’eux!”
How could I implore sympathy? Would you have given me yours?