The Irrepressible Peccadillo

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It was a kind of natural conspiracy. Everything worked out just right to go wrong, and that’s the way it went. I figured from the first to be a damn fool at last, and that’s what I was.

It was late in the afternoon of a day that was in June, and I was in my office talking to Mrs. Roscoe Burdock, who wanted to divorce Mr. Roscoe Burdock, her husband, for beating the hell out of her while drunk. Mr. Burdock was, I mean. Drunk, that is. According, at least, to the testimony of Mrs. Burdock, which was probably not strictly unbiased. The truth of the matter was, I suspected, that Mr. and Mrs. Burdock were both drunk, which was a suspicion based soundly on precedent.

Mrs. Burdock is of no particular consequence in this account, except that there she was in my office, late in the afternoon of this particular day, and I wished she wasn’t. I wished that she had never come, or would at least go away, because I was developing a feeling of sadness and loneliness that was already pretty bad and would keep on getting worse, because that was the kind of evening it was going to be.

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