Anthony Howell
NARRATIVES
There was one who seemed certain to become very talented, but
his mother cherished him more than she then did his father.
Because of the certainty of talent in him he was always much the
youngest in his year. Keeping up exhausted him. He became sick
in thought. His father is highly esteemed in the universities, and
he kept the sick in thought at home, treating him with the drpgs
suggested but withholding any treatment that entailed the
analysis of thought. The drugs ate into the young man's
thoughts and drove him mad. One day he went into a field a
long way from the home of his parents and swallowed too many
drugs and died.
There is a man who was married to one more talented than he is
himself, and he left her with two children and she killed herself.
Then he married a woman less talented than either his first wife
or himself. She left him, taking the two children with her, and
killed herself and the children.
There is one more charming than he ever was talented who will
come into a fortune when he produces an heir. He loves boys and
has been withheld his inheritance. Having enough to drink on,
he hardly craves any fortune. He most loves boys who have been
convicts. Getting on, he has decided that he could use a fortune
to better the chances of convicts. He has found a wife and sent
her off abroad with instructions to conceive.
There was a very talented woman who lived with another
woman and a dog. Her brother, who had always thought of
himself as talented, became jealous of the strength of his sister
and avoided her and spoke of her as of a person with no talent
beyond an unnecessary oddity. Then she decided to publish her
thoughts, but those who published their thoughts in that market
and those who came there
to
discover them would neither help
her
to
publish nor show an interest in discovering her thought
