Gilbert Cannan

“ The violence of his meeting with her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness, even in his attempted sympathy.
That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing. ”

“ He was tormented by a vision of England, this little isle, the home of heroes and great men, groaning beneath the weight of miles of such streets and sinking under the tread of millions of men like James Boothroyd. Lustily he strove for a cool, intellectual consideration of it all, a point from which the network of the meanish streets of the cities of England could be seen as justifiable, necessary, and unto their own ends sufficient, but, seen from the Copas world, they were repulsive and harsh; viewed through Matilda they were touched with magic. ”

“ I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon. ”