he way to Write!" he said.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Accompanying this pleasant, pregnant bit of paper, possessed of such
admirable literary excellence, were the following flimsy lines from
Edward's self, to Algernon incomprehensible.

As there is a man to be seen behind these lines in the dull unconscious
process of transformation from something very like a villain to
something by a few degrees more estimable, we may as well look at the
letter in full.

It begins with a neat display of consideration for the person addressed,
common to letters that are dictated by overpowering egoism:--

"Dear Algy,--I hope you are working and attending regularly to
office business. Look to that and to your health at present.
Depend upon it, there is nothing like work. Fix your teeth in it.
Work is medicine. A truism! Truisms, whether they lie in the
depths of thought, or on the surface, are at any rate the pearls of
experience.

"I am coming home. Let me know the instant this affair is over. I
can't tell why I wait here. I fall into lethargies. I write to no
one but to you. Your supposition that I am one of the hangers-on of
the coquette of her time, and that it is for her I am seeking to get
free, is conceived with your usual discrimination. For Margaret
Lovell? Do you imagine that I desire to be all my life kicking the
beam, weighed in capricious scales, appraised to the direct nicety,
petulantly taken up, probed for my weakest point, and then flung
into the grate like a child's toy? That's the fate of the several
asses who put on the long-eared Lovell-livery.

"All women are the same. Know one, know all. Aware of this, and
too wise to let us study them successfully, Nature pretty language
this is for you, Algy! I can do nothing but write nonsense. I am
sick of life. I feel choked. After a month, Paris is sweet
biscuit.

"I have sent you the order for the money. If it were two, or
twenty, thousand pounds, it would be the same to me.

"I swear to heaven that my lowest cynical ideas of women, and the
loathing with which their simply animal vagaries inspires a
thoughtful man, are distanced and made to seem a benevolent
criticism, by the actualities of my experience. I say that you
cannot put faith in a woman. Even now, I do not--it's against
reason--I do not believe that she--this Dahlia--means to go through
with it. She is trying me. I ha