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.
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