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Questionable Shapes by William Dean Howells
page 33 of 148 (22%)
not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together.
Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad
Hewson's folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected
in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not
cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It
seeing even more active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself
sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and
reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in
every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out
that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his
debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort
of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had
accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty
took the form that was most of all distasteful to him: the form of
publicity in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to
the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her
reporter's Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an
interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary
of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the
apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while
tastefully disguising Hewson's identity in the figure of A Well-Known
Society-man.

When Hewson read this Story (and it seemed to him that no means of
bringing it to his notice at the club, and on the street, and by mail was
left unemployed), he had two thoughts: one was of St. John, and one was
of Miss Hernshaw. In all his exploitations of his experience he had
carefully, he thought religiously, concealed the scene, except that one
only time when Miss Hernshaw suddenly got it out of him by that demand of
hers, "Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early and
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