The Pond by Saki — Read

Mona had always regarded herself as cast for the tragic role; her name, her large dark eyes, and the style of hairdressing that best suited her, all contributed to support that outlook on life. She wore habitually the air of one who has seen trouble, or, at any rate, expects to do so very shortly; and she was accustomed to speak of the Angel of Death almost as other people would speak of their chauffeur waiting round the corner to fetch them at the appointed moment. Fortune-tellers, noting this tendency in her disposition, invariably hinted at something in her fate which they did not care to speak about too explicitly. "You will marry the man of your choice, but afterwards you will pass through strange fires," a Bond Street two-guinea palm-oilist had told her. "Thank you," said Mona, "for your plain-speaking. But I have known it always."

In marrying John Waddacombe, Mona had mated herself with a man who shared none of her intimacy with the shadowy tragedies of what she called the half-seen world. He had the substantial tragedies of his own world to bother about, without straining his mental eyesight for the elusive and dubious distractions belonging to a sphere that lay entirely beyond his range of vision; or, for the matter of that, his range of interests. Potato blight, swine fever, the Government's land legislation, and other pests of the farm absorbed his attention as well as his energies, and even if he had admitted the possibility of such a disease as soul-sickness, of which Mona recognised eleven distinct varieties, most of them incurable, he would probably have prescribed a fortnight at the seaside as the most hopeful and natural remedy. There was no disguising the fact, John Waddacombe was of the loam, loamy. If he had cared to go into politics he would have been known inevitably as honest John Waddacombe, and after that there is nothing more to be said.