Rejjy. [Startled by his urgency, they hurry to
him]. I'm frightfully sorry to desert on this day; but I must
bolt. This time it really is pure cowardice. I cant help it.
REGINALD. What are you afraid of?
HOTCHKISS. I dont know. Listen to me. I was a young fool living
by myself in London. I ordered my first ton of coals from that
woman's husband. At that time I did not know that it is not true
economy to buy the lowest priced article: I thought all coals
were alike, and tried the thirteen shilling kind because it
seemed cheap. It proved unexpectedly inferior to the family
Silkstone; and in the irritation into which the first scuttle
threw me, I called at the shop and made an idiot of myself as she
described.
SYKES. Well, suppose you did! Laugh at it, man.
HOTCHKISS. At that, yes. But there was something worse. Judge of
my horror when, calling on the coal merchant to make a trifling
complaint at finding my grate acting as a battery of quick-firing
guns, and being confronted by his vulgar wife, I felt in her
presence an extraordinary sensation of unrest, of emotion, of
unsatisfied need. I'll not disgust you with details of the
madness and folly that followed that meeting. But it went as far
as this: that I actually found myself prowling past the shop at
night under a sort of desperate necessity to be near some place
where she had been.
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