. Or, rather, he said that they sent
him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't
want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and
Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant
moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching
anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in
this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can
only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful
flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful
are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself,
in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the
headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can't conceal from myself the
fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was
just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the
physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what
he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on
several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him
robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much
of a sentimentalist as he was.. ..

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we
are here for. But then, I don't like society--much. I am that absurd
figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient
haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and
all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I
visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In
twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own
oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My
tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me.
So life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite
me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly
well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front
of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows.
Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be
suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something that
she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an Omnipotent
Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks", perhaps. It is
v