While I was having tea there was a ring at the bell, and my landlady brought in a large parcel.
I recognised the writing on the label. The hand was Margaret’s. I wondered in an impersonal sort of way what Margaret could be sending to me. From the feel of it the contents were paper.
It amuses me now to think that it was a good half-hour before I took the trouble to cut the string. Fortune and happiness were waiting for me in that parcel, and I would not bother to open it. I sat in my chair, smoking and thinking, and occasionally cast a gloomy eye at the parcel. But I did not open it. Then my pipe went out, and I found that I had no matches in my pocket. There were some at the farther end of the mantelpiece. I had to get up to reach them, and, once up, I found myself filled with a sufficient amount of energy to take a knife from the table and cut the string.
Languidly I undid the brown paper. The contents were a pile of typewritten pages and a letter.
It was the letter over which my glassy eyes travelled first.
“My own dear, brave, old darling James,” it began, and its purport was that she had written a play, and wished me to put my name to it and hawk it round: to pass off as my work her own amateurish effort at playwriting. Ludicrous. And so immoral, too. I had always imagined that Margaret had a perfectly flawless sense of honesty. Yet here she was asking me deliberately to impose on the credulity of some poor, trusting theatrical manager. The dreadful disillusionment of it shocked me.
Most men would have salved their wounded susceptibilities by putting a match to the manuscript without further thought or investigation.
But I have ever been haunted by a somewhat over-strict conscience, and I sat down there and then to read the stupid stuff.
At seven o’clock I was still reading.
My dinner was brought in. I bolted it with Margaret’s play propped up against the potato dish.