BEING THE LOVE STORY
OF AN UGLY MAN
BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK
1911
COPYRIGHT 1911 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
W.R. DAKIN, M.D.
My Dear Dakin:
Partly because you have a love of gardens, partly because together wehave seen Ballysheen when the gorse was in its full blast of yellow,but most of all because I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude for agreat friendship, I am asking you to accept this book of mine. It wasafter a talk with you one night that I went straight home and wroteChapter I on a clean sheet of paper, therefore the book is doubly yoursand I ask you to accept it in proof of the fact that, not only am Igrateful, but also that I am
Your sincere friend,
E. Temple Thurston.
Adelphi, 1911.
It was the first, the very first, day of spring. A man walked by mewith a narcissus in his coat and he was humming a tune.
By the looks of him—the tail-coat, the bowler hat, the little leatherhand-bag—he was an artisan. You know that game of placing people.I put him down as an electrician. He had been attending to a job upWest. He was returning to the premises of his firm in Bond Street. Allthis, of course, was surmise. But of one thing I was certain. He hadno business to be walking through the Park. He ought to have been on a'bus, or in the Underground Railway, speeding back to save his firm'smost precious time, ready to start forth once more upon his firm's mosturgent errands. Instead of this—it was the first day of spring—he waswalking through the Park and I was envying him. I envied the narcissusin his coat. Even the very tune he was humming touched a sense ofcovetousness in my heart.
"Nor his ox," thought I, "nor his ass, nor anything that is his." Avery stern Commandment that; for even as I took off my silk hat andbrushed the rim of it once with my sleeve, I envied him for histail-coat and his billy-cock.
It was little enough to want of any man, his tail-coat or hisbilly-cock, his narcissus or the tune set humming from his heart. I didnot want his leather bag at all. He could keep that. Yet it seemed thatI was to break the tenth decree of Moses to its last letter, or, sinceI was going backwards, to its first; for after he had gone by somethirty yards or so, I was envying him for something else altogether.
A few moments before he came, a little nursemaid had wheeled her pramdown the path where I was sitting. She was one of those rosy-cheekedcreatures who come up from the country to grow pale in London, just asthe flowers come up of a morning to Covent Garden and wither perhapsbefore the night is out. She must have been very new to it all, for shehad all the country freshness about her still. Her cheeks glowed i