THIS IS THE SADDEST STORY I have ever heard. We had known the
Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an
extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose
and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife
and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible
to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all
about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with
English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out
what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months
ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded
the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English
people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as
we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say
that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the
society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere
between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters
for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September.
You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the
saying is, a “heart”, and, from the statement that my wife is dead,
that she was the sufferer.