charming letter. She answered it with reams of passion, clumsy, for
she had no gift of expression, ill-written, and vulgar; the letter bored
him, and when it was followed next day by another, and the day after by a
third, he began to think her love no longer flattering but alarming. He
did not answer; and she bombarded him with telegrams, asking him if he
were ill and had received her letters; she said his silence made her
dreadfully anxious. He was forced to write, but he sought to make his
reply as casual as was possible without being offensive: he begged her not
to wire, since it was difficult to explain telegrams to his mother, an
old-fashioned person for whom a telegram was still an event to excite
tremor. She answered by return of post that she must see him and announced
her intention to pawn things (she had the dressing-case which Philip had
given her as a wedding-present and could raise eight pounds on that) in
order to come up and stay at the market town four miles from which was the
village in which his father practised. This frightened Griffiths; and he,
this time, made use of the telegraph wires to tell her that she must do
nothing of the kind. He promised to let her know the moment he came up to
London, and, when he did, found that she had already been asking for him
at the hospital at which he had an appointment. He did not like this, and,
on seeing her, told Mildred that she was not to come there on any pretext;
and now, after an absence of three weeks, he found that she bored him
quite decidedly; he wondered why he had ever troubled about her, and made
up his mind to break with her as soon as he could. He was a person who
dreaded quarrels, nor did he want to give pain; but at the same time he
had other things to do, and he was quite determined not to let Mildred
bother him. When he met her he was pleasant, cheerful, amusing,
affectionate; he invented convincing excuses for the interval since last
he had seen her; but he did everything he could to avoid her. When she
forced him to make appointments he sent telegrams to her at the last
moment to put himself off; and his landlady (the first three months of his
appointment he was spending in rooms) had orders to say he was out when
Mildred called. She would waylay him in the street and, knowing she had
been waiting about for him to come out of the hospital for a couple of
hours, he would give her a few charming, friendly words and bolt off with
the excuse that