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The 30,000 Dollar Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain
page 34 of 362 (09%)
in character. When she was building her first foundling asylum,
what was he doing? Alas! When she was projecting her noble Society
for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing? Ah, what, indeed!
When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet,
moving with resistless march, were sweeping the fatal bottle from
the land, what was he doing? Getting drunk three times a day.
When she, builder of a hundred cathedrals, was being gratefully
welcomed and blest in papal Rome and decorated with the Golden Rose
which she had so honorably earned, what was he doing? Breaking the
bank at Monte Carlo.

He stopped. He could go no farther; he could not bear the rest.
He rose up, with a great resolution upon his lips: this secret
life should be revealing, and confessed; no longer would he live
it clandestinely, he would go and tell her All.

And that is what he did. He told her All; and wept upon
her bosom; wept, and moaned, and begged for her forgiveness.
It was a profound shock, and she staggered under the blow, but he
was her own, the core of her heart, the blessing of her eyes,
her all in all, she could deny him nothing, and she forgave him.
She felt that he could never again be quite to her what he had
been before; she knew that he could only repent, and not reform;
yet all morally defaced and decayed as he was, was he not her own,
her very own, the idol of her deathless worship? She said she
was his serf, his slave, and she opened her yearning heart and took
him in.



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