Page:The Story of the Gadsbys - Kipling (1888).djvu/11



CAPTAIN J. MAFFLIN Duke of Derry's (Pink) Hussars.

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You will remember that I wrote this story as an Awful Warning. None the less you have seen fit to disregard it, and have followed Gadsby's example—as I betted you would. I acknowledge that you paid the money at once, but you have prejudiced the mind of Mrs. Maffiin against myself; for though I am almost the only respectable friend of your bachelor days, she has refused my card to me throughout the season. Further, she caused you to invite me to dinner at the Club, where you called me "a wild ass of the desert," and went home at half-past ten, after discoursing for twenty minutes on the responsibilites of house-keeping. You now drive a mail-phaeton and sit under a Church of England clergyman. I am not angry, Jack. It is your fate, as it was Gaddy's, and his fate who can avoid? Do not think that I am moved by a spirit of revenge as I write, thus publicly, that you and you alone are responsible for this book. In other and more expansive days, when you could look at a magnum without flushing and at a cheroot without turning white, you supplied me with most of the material. Take it back again would that I could have preserved your fetterless