I tell you, I had no regret. What had I to regret? I
suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized
long before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she
represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with
sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a
certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling came to the
surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had
seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly
that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks,
of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that
feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her
room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But
I just couldn't do it; it would have been like chasing a scrap of
paper--an occupation ignoble for a grown man.
And, as it began, so that matter has remained. I didn't care whether
she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. It simply
didn't interest me. Florence didn't matter.
I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford and
that my indifference was therefore discreditable.
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