Explore "The Remittance Man" by Ambrose Pratt on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The fallible human mind on being presented with the unexpected, almost always fails to realise the relative importance of substantial facts.
The personal element obtrudes and becomes paramount. Exasperating details seize the attention and distort the judgment. For that reason, on the morning after any tragic happening, one's outlook is either brighter or darker than at first; it is never quite the same. When Major Reay awoke he found himself more cheerful than he had dared to hope. On the previous evening the worst part of his misery had consisted in an exaggerated sense of the fatal finality of Marion's confession. It had seemed to him that her love for Jan Digby was an absolutely irremediable disaster. He began to marvel how an old stager like himself could have imagined anything so absurd! That a young girl's first fancy should prove her last! Could anything be more ridiculous? He remembered that when a boy of Marion's age he had fallen madly in love with a woman old enough to be his mother! "Pshaw!" he soliloquised, "she is only a baby yet. Let us get the fellow out of the way, and in six weeks she'll have forgotten his existence!"