I am going to London
because I have been stifled and choked--I want room to breathe, to see
men and women who live. Oh, you don't know the sort of place I have
come from--the brain poison of it, the hideous sameness and narrowness
of it all."
"Tell me a little," she said, "and why at last you made up your mind to
leave. It is not so long, you know, since I saw you in somewhat
different guise."
A quick shiver seemed to pass through him; underneath his tanned skin he
was paler, and the blood in his veins was cold. His eyes, fixed upon
the flying landscape, were set in a fixed, unseeing stare--surely the
fields were peopled with evil memories, and faces in the trees were
mocking him. So he remained for several moments as though in the grip
of a nightmare, and the lady watched him. There was a little tragedy,
then, behind.
"There was a man once," he said, "who drew a line through his life, and
said to himself that everything behind it concerned some other
person--not him. So with me. Such memories as I have, I shall
strangle. To-day I commence a new life."
She sighed.
"One's past" she said, "is not always so easily to be disposed of.
There are ghosts which will haunt us, and sometimes the ghosts are
living figures.
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