Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/61

 Ladies' Own World between advertisements for scents and flesh reducers. It was all sordid and unworthy, but it helped to eke out the income given him by Uncle Horace. Well, sometime he would finish his book on Miracles. . . . Some day if he had any money and could escape from the boredom of Brinoë.

And then again when he had been on the verge of inheriting all that money from Uncle Horace the old man chose in his dotage to marry a strumpet, a cheap Cockney woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Aunt Bessie! He thought of her with disgust as he had seen her in the Temperance Hotel in Bloomsbury on the day he went to buy her off with promises of money after Uncle Horace was dead. A yellow-haired slattern, fat and vulgar, with a Cockney accent. But then Uncle Horace had always been a common, vulgar old man. . . . To leave all that income to her with the provision that when she died it was to go on to him, her nephew! And that woman—his Aunt Bessie—was ten years younger than himself and had the constitution of an ox! No, he had been haunted by bad luck. Nothing ever came out right. And now he was nearly fifty-three. His life meant nothing to himself or to anyone else. He had been a failure and it was too late now to accomplish anything. Nothing that mattered had ever happened to him.

At eleven o'clock when he turned again toward his own flat he went by way of the Palazzo Gon-