Stand and deliver. I stood there
gaping at the words like an idiot, my blood tingling at the implied
accusation. The peremptoriness of it! The impudence of the boy! The wild
extravagance of the idea! And yet, while my head was reeling with
one buffet a memory arose and gave me another on the other side. I
remembered the preposterous attitude in which Dale had found us when he
rushed from Berlin into Lola's drawing-room.
I took the confounded telegram into a remote corner of the lounge, like
a dog with a bone, and growled over it for a time until the humour of
the situation turned the growl into a chuckle. Even had I been in sound
health and strength, the idea of running off with Lola would have been
absurd. But for me, in my present eumoirous disposition of mind; for
me, a half-disembodied spirit who had cast all vain and disturbing human
emotions into the mud of Murglebed-on-Sea; for me who had a spirit's
calm disregard for the petty passions and interests of mankind and
walked through the world with no other object than healing a few human
woes; for me who already saw death on the other side of the river and
found serious occupation in exchanging airy badinage with him; for me
with an abominable little pain inside inexorably eating my life out and
wasting me away literally and perceptibly like a shadow and twisting
me up half a dozen times a day in excruciating agony; for me, in this
delectable condition of soul and this deplorable condition of body, to
think of running hundreds of miles from home with--to say the least of
it--so inconvenient a creature as a big, bronze-haired woman, the idea
was inexpressibly and weirdly comic.
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