I am no doubt like every other man; only, probably
because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am
able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person. I have
never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or
the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only
followed, faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward
Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he
really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney
Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted
Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't
really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a
nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted
Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer
and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The
things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the
wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond
me.
Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the
olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what
they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are
all men's lives like the lives of us good people--like the lives of
the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken,
tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated
by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil
knows?
For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of
the Ashburnham tragedy.
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