Prev | Current Page 237 | Next

Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka), 1859-1927

"They and I"

The thought of what he might
one day bring home has been a nightmare to me ever since he left
school. I suppose it is to most fathers. Especially if one thinks
of the women one loved oneself when in the early twenties. A large
pale-faced girl, who served in a bun-shop in the Strand, is the first
I can recollect. How I trembled when by chance her hand touched
mine! I cannot recall a single attraction about her except her size,
yet for nearly six months I lunched off pastry and mineral waters
merely to be near her. To this very day an attack of indigestion
will always recreate her image in my mind. Another was a thin,
sallow girl, but with magnificent eyes, I met one afternoon in the
South Kensington Museum. She was a brainless, vixenish girl, but the
memory of her eyes would always draw me back to her. More than two-
thirds of our time together we spent in violent quarrels; and all my
hopes of eternity I would have given to make her my companion for
life. But for Luck, in the shape of a well-to-do cab proprietor, as
great an idiot as myself I might have done it. The third was a
chorus girl: on the whole, the best of the bunch. Her father was a
coachman, and she had ten brothers and sisters, most of them doing
well in service. And she was succeeded--if I have the order correct-
-by the ex-wife of a solicitor, a sprightly lady; according to her
own account the victim of complicated injustice.


Pages:
225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249
Mimo Wszystko Fundacja Hobbit Pajacyk Fundacja Iskierka Podaruj Zycie kredyty gotówkowe Web Design UK Odzież promocyjna Windykacja Kre-Alkalyn