Her Faithful Knight — page 339: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

And Last. 335 a deux to be sent in from the best restaurant in the ndigh- borhood, with the intention of discussing it in the com- pany of a charming and sympathetic young person whose acquaintance he had casually made a few days before. The visitor was to have arrived at nine o’clock, and in deference to the prejudices which a censorious world and a rebellious wife might be expected to entertain, Darcy had considerately dismissed his attendant at half- past eight, with full permission to remain away until the afternoon of the following day. The testimony of ser- vants in courts of law, as Darcy knew, is almost invariably damaging to their masters, servants being as a rule prac- tical and vulgar-minded persons, incapable of grasping the higher and purer side of their employers’ motives. To Darcy there was nothing incongruous in the fact that, while waiting for his expected guest, he should employ his time in writing to his mother, to tell her how cruelly his conduct had been misunderstood and maligned by the magistrate that day, and how deeply his feelings had been wounded by that gentleman’s remarks. Seated at a small table furnished with pens, ink and paper, a siphon of soda, a decanter half filled with whiskey. and a frequently replenished tumbler, Darcy felt tears of self-pity rush into his eyes, and let them splash down onto the open letter he was writing as he dilated on his wrongs. He contrived that the tears should fall where the ink was wet, because he knew the sight of their traces would touch his mother, and he felt badly in need of her sympathy. “You, my only true friend,” he wrote; “the only woman living who has ever really understood me, how you would have suffered if you had seen’ me sitting in court to-day a target for the contemptible sneers of a paltry English Jack-in-office, whose senses had been stirred by the sight of my wife’s beauty! Her sister was barely cold in her Comicoooks (C@)