Well, you've seen the
place. You've been here long enough to know what it's like, and what
I've had to go through. Nobody wrote me, and nobody came to see me;
not one of my own sisters even, though they've been in the Riviera all
this spring--not a day's journey away. Sometimes a man turned up that
I knew, but it was almost worse than not seeing any one. It only made
me more homesick when he'd gone. And for weeks I used to walk up and
down that beach there alone late in the night, until I got to thinking
that the waves were talking to me, and I got queer in my head. I had
to fight it just as I used to have to fight against whiskey, and to
talk fast so that I wouldn't think. And I tried to kill myself
hunting, and only got a broken collar-bone for my pains. Well, all
this time Alice was living in Paris and New York. I heard that some
English captain was going to marry her, and then I read in the Paris
_Herald_ that she was settled in the American colony there, and
one day it gave a list of the people who'd been to a reception she
gave. She could go where she pleased, and she had money in her own
right, you know; and she was being revenged on me every day. And I was
here knowing it, and loving her worse than I ever loved anything on
earth, and having lost the right to tell her so, and not able to go to
her. Then one day some chap turned up from here and told her about me,
and about how miserable I was, and how well I was being punished. He
thought it would please her, I suppose.
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