The Journal of a Disappointed Man

But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own immediate decease--an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House--what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to be somebody even in death. A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his inamorata--a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl--while she gave us daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres); there was Miss M---- listening to her fiancé, Capt. O---- (home from India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T----, a sour old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick--a fluffy girl of 18 or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common" musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee, who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little company--so motley, ill-assorted--who had come together not from love or regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars was equally comfortless.