I knew he would not get my
letter more than a couple of hours before I should see him, and
thought the short interval of suspense might break the shock of what I
had to say.
Never do I remember to have halted more between two opinions than on
my journey to Battersby upon this unhappy errand. When I thought of
the little sallow-faced lad whom I had remembered years before, of the
long and savage cruelty with which he had been treated in childhood-
cruelty none the less real for having been due to ignorance and
stupidity rather than to deliberate malice; of the atmosphere of lying
and self-laudatory hallucination in which he had been brought up; of
the readiness the boy had shown to love anything that would be good
enough to let him, and of how affection for his parents, unless I am
much mistaken, had only died in him because it had been killed anew,
again and again and again, each time that it had tried to spring; when
I thought of all this I felt as though, if the matter had rested
with me, I would have sentenced Theobald and Christina to mental
suffering even more severe than that which was about to fall upon
them. But on the other hand, when I thought of Theobald's own
childhood, of that dreadful old George Pontifex his father, of John
and Mrs.
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