ing
Florence and the flat in charge of those two. And serve him very right,
is all that I can say. He was a bad sort of blackmailer; I hope Florence
does not have his company in the next world.

As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I would have separated those
two if I had known that they really and passionately loved each other.
I do not know where the public morality of the case comes in, and, of
course, no man really knows what he would have done in any given case.
But I truly believe that I would have united them, observing ways and
means as decent as I could. I believe that I should have given them
money to live upon and that I should have consoled myself somehow. At
that date I might have found some young thing, like Maisie Maidan, or
the poor girl, and I might have had some peace. For peace I never had
with Florence, and hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of
love after a year or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile
object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I
had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm from
Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were, the
subject of a bet--the trophy of an athlete's achievement, a parsley
crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, his
abstentions, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a wife,
I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even proud of the
way she dressed.

But her passion for Jimmy was not even a passion, and, mad as the
suggestion may appear, she was frightened for her life. Yes, she was
afraid of me. I will tell you how that happened. I had, in the old days,
a darky servant, called Julius, who valeted me, and waited on me, and
loved me, like the crown of his head. Now, when we left Waterbury to go
to the "Pocahontas", Florence entrusted to me one very special and very
precious leather grip. She told me that her life might depend on that
grip, which contained her drugs against heart attacks. And, since I was
never much of a hand at carrying things, I entrusted this, in turn, to
Julius, who was a grey-haired chap of sixty or so, and very picturesque
at that. He made so much impression on Florence that she regarded him as
a sort of father, and absolutely refused to let me take him to Paris. He
would have inconvenienced her.

Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at being left behind that he
must needs go and drop the precious grip. I saw r