"You're a cur."
"No, I'm trying to be a gentleman. Besides, what's the matter with Cokaleek? Hasn't he millions, and a charming house in the heart of the collieries?"
"He's all that's delightful, only I happen to hate him. Directly I leave off chaffing him I begin to think of arsenic, and, brilliant as I am, I can't coruscate all day. It's very mean of you not to want to elope."
"I daresay; but I'm the only rational being in the book, and I want to sustain my character."
Chapter the Last.
Bobo stayed, and Bill went in the carriage that had been ordered for the elopement; and then there happened an incident so rare in the realms of fiction that it has stamped my novel at once and for ever as the work of an original mind.
Cokaleek, the noble, unappreciated husband, got himself killed in the hunting-field. He went out with Bobo one morning, and she came home, a little earlier than usual, without him, and smoked cigarettes by the fire, while he stayed out in the dusk and just meekly rolled over a hedge, with his horse uppermost. He wasn't like Guy Livingstone; he wasn't a bit like dozens of heroes of French novels, who have died the same kind of death. He was just as absolutely Cokaleek as his wife was Bobo.
And did Bill marry Bobo, or Bobo Bill?
Not she! Another woman might have done it—but not Bobo. She knew too well what the intelligent reader expected of her; so she jilted Bill, in a thoroughly cold-blooded and Bobo-ish manner, and got herself married to an Austrian Prince at half-an-hour's notice, by special licence from the A. of C.