"Watch me," said Laura. The divorce was swift, scandalous, and deeply satisfying to Egbert, who attended the proceedings with a small bag of peppermints and an expression of vindicated gloom. Laura cited "fundamental incompatibility of temperament," which was technically true. Julian did not contest. He had, he told the judge, "come to believe in the possibility of redemption," which Laura noted down for future use as evidence of insanity.
"Why not?" replied Laura, adjusting a hat that looked like a small, feathered hearse. "They will not complain of the crowding. And one meets such interesting people at funerals—people who are not merely dying to meet you, but have actually achieved the distinction of being dead in your vicinity."
"He is a dangerous radical!" he spluttered, when Laura announced her intention to marry Julian. "The man wrote pamphlets! Against property! Against the church! Against, I suspect, the very concept of breakfast!" laura by saki pdf
"You are morbid," he said.
There was a young man—lean, dark, with the kind of restless hands that looked as though they were perpetually searching for something to break. He did not weep. He stared at the coffin with an expression of cold, scientific curiosity. Laura was fascinated. "Watch me," said Laura
Egbert winced. He had a sensitive soul, which Laura regarded as a kind of internal malformation, like a cleft palate of the character.
"Julian," she said one evening, "you are becoming sentimental. Yesterday you sighed at a widow. A real, actual sigh. I thought you were above such biological weaknesses." Julian did not contest
"So did Shelley," said Laura dreamily. "And he drowned beautifully."
It was not, unfortunately, a question of whether Laura would attend the funeral; it was a question of how many funerals she would contrive to attend in the course of the week. Her obituaries, read with the thrilling detachment of a booking agent scanning racecards, had already yielded three promising prospects: a distant cousin who had left her a pug, a retired general whose liver had finally mutinied, and a wealthy philanthropist whose charities she had never patronized but whose buffet she had thoroughly admired.