By this, if by nothing else, I recognise the
beneficence of the high gods--they have given us tired men Dumas.
CHAPTER XIII
September 30th.
Something is wrong with Antoinette. The dinner she served up
this evening was all but uneatable. Something is wrong with
Stenson, who has taken to playing his lugubrious hymn-tunes on
the concertina while I am in the house; I won't have it.
Something is wrong with the cat. He wanders round the house like
a lost soul, sniffing at everything. This evening he actually
jumped onto the dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in
which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed
heart-rendingly in my face. Something is wrong with the house,
with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the
air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History
of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a
dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour. Something is
wrong with me.
Something, too, is wrong with Judith, who has just returned from
her stay with the Willoughbys.
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