Ulysses
like that the goby unless you were a blithering idiot alto-
gether and refuse to have anything to do with them as a
golden rule in private life and their felonsetting, there al-
ways being the offchance of a Dannyman coming forward
and turning queen’s evidence or king’s now like Denis or
Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from
that he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on
principle. Yet, though such criminal propensities had never
been an inmate of his bosom in any shape or form, he cer-
tainly did feel and no denying it (while inwardly remaining
what he was) a certain kind of admiration for a man who
had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage
of his political convictions (though, personally, he would
never be a party to any such thing), off the same bat as those
love vendettas of the south, have her or swing for her, when
the husband frequently, after some words passed between
the two concerning her relations with the other lucky mor-
tal (he having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries
on his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial li-
aison by plunging his knife into her, until it just struck him
that Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car
for the actual perpetrators of the outrage and so was not,
if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush
which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary
saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient history
by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcet-
era, he had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought
to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high. Like
actresses, always farewell positively last performance then