dour. . . .

My invalid peevishness, too, has accentuated my sensitiveness to shades
of refinement. There is about Lola a bluffness, a hardihood of speech,
a contempt for the polite word and the pretty conventional turning of
a phrase, a lack of reticence in the expression of ideas and feelings,
which jar, in spite of my gratitude, on my unstrung nerves. Her
ignorance, too, of a thousand things, a knowledge of which is the
birthright of such women as Eleanor Faversham, causes conversational
excursions to end in innumerable blind alleys. I know that she would
give her soul to learn. This she has told me in so many words, and when,
in a delicate way, I try to teach her, she listens humbly, pathetically,
fixing me with her great, gold-flecked eyes, behind which a deep sadness
burns wistfully. Sometimes when I glance up from my book, I see that her
eyes, instead of being bent on hers have been resting long on my face,
and they say as clearly as articulate speech: "Teach me, love me, use
me, do what you will with me. I am yours, your chattel, your thing, till
the end of time."

I lie awake at night and wonder what I shall do with my naked life
sheltered only by the garment of this woman's love, which I have
accepted and cannot repay. I groan aloud when I reflect on the
irremediable mess, hash, bungle I have made of things. Did ever sick man
wake up to such a hopeless welter? Can you be surprised that I regarded
it with dismay? Of course, there is a simple way out of it, and into
the shadowy world which I contemplated so long, at first with mocking
indifference and then with eager longing. A gentleman called Cato once
took it, with considerable aplomb. The means are to my hand. In my
drawer lies the revolver with which the excellent Colonel Bunnion (long
since departed from Mustapha Superieur) armed me against the banditti of
Algiers, and which I forgot to return to him. I could empty one or more
of the six chambers into my person and that would be the end. But I
don't think history records the suicide of any humorist, however dismal.
He knows too well the tricks of the Arch-Jester's game. Very likely I
should merely blow away half my head, and Destiny would give my good
doctor another chance of achieving immortal fame by glueing it on again.
No, I cannot think seriously of suicide by violent means. Of course, I
might follow the example of one Antonios Polemon, a later Greek sophist,
who suffered so dreadfully from gout that