I was therefore to be a good boy and not try to peep
under the curtain before the show was ready: I should enjoy it all
the more if I sat very still.
I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn't help giving a jump
on seeing in The Times, after I had been a week or two in Munich
and before, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement
of the sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly, by letter,
appealed to Gwendolen for particulars, and she wrote me that her
mother had yielded to long-threatened failure of the heart. She
didn't say, but I took the liberty of reading into her words, that
from the point of view of her marriage and also of her eagerness,
which was quite a match for mine, this was a solution more prompt
than could have been expected and more radical than waiting for the
old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly admit indeed that at the
time--for I heard from her repeatedly--I read some singular things
into Gwendolen's words and some still more extraordinary ones into
her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the time over, and it
brings back the oddest sense of my having been, both for months and
in spite of myself, a kind of coerced spectator. All my life had
taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to
have committed itself to keep astare.
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