The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 205: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

198 ‘The Little Girl, Now a Woman. “She loved him,” I heard him saying. “She will never marry. . . . A woman loves but once; a second love with them isn’t real love . . . and Mamie is too much of a woman to give anything else to a man. Neither one was to blame. ‘They had to part, and so they did. . . . She loved him!” * * * * * “k * x One night Tom was ill and I was by his bed. We had no light, and the twilight made him confidential; or, per- haps, it was his mind wandering. “There was a little girl once, Paul,” he said as he lay on his rough bed in that rough little room. “We used to play together; and one afternoon, I remember, we played keeping house, and I was the man and she was my wife. I often think of that afternoon—we talked then of living together when we got big! I wonder if she has forgotten it. She never speaks of it. But then, it never could be. This sickness came, ahd now I am nearly deaf and blind. No one wants to be with me. It’s a lonely life, Paul! No one feels the want of a home more than I do. And I am entirely cut off from one. Sometimes I feel that if that little girl, now a woman, would only come into my room once—if she would sit down by my bed only once, as you are sitting—I would be more satis- fied; my life would be happier. The old room wouldn’t look so lonesome if she had been in it once. I have given her up, but—I love her still. It seems the wider apart we drift, the more my thoughts turn to her and that one summer afternoon.” EGomichbooks. Go