Explore "The House in Lordship Lane" by A.E.W. Mason on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The manuscript which Maltby found locked in George Crottle's bureau offered a complete account of the crimes without a sign of remorse. On the other hand, it was very vain--youth's passionate cry for authority over age alternating with youth's despair at age's authority over youth. He had completed the inevitable drudgery which precedes mastery in either the arts or industry, to find himself in the end a cipher in a counting-house. Septimus Crottle should have handed over the Dagger Line years ago to nimbler wits and wider views. But he had not and this is what had come of his obstinacy--a perpetual maddening threat which he was going to get rid of to-night.
"I go out to-night to play my last hand. If I succeed I shall destroy this manuscript, although its logic might hold a lesson for students and its narrative another for authors."