The Wild Goose Author:Gouverneur Morris General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1919 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's Sons Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you ... more »can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: At such times he wished to heaven that he could think of some way of ending it all. There was too much blood in his head, or else the train made too much noise. He set many snares for sleep but they enmeshed nothing. He was in for one of those nights when uninvited thoughts run in circles and trivial things become magnified until they cast shadows across life itself. But his thoughts were not all unpleasant, and lingered rosily at times over those years with Diana which had contained for them both, as nearly as may be, the sum of all human blisses. He liked to think of himself as an unselfish man. But he was not. He could, however, be immensely generous, which is a very different thing, and his night thoughts were often brightened with immolations and self-sacrificings, which in a few more minutes of thinking became so modified with conditions and complexities as to lose their brightness. In short, he could not in any horoscope of Diana's future leave himself out. He wondered if this was due to some fault in his character, or to the fact that the roots of their two lives were indeed inextricably intertwined. Loving her he could not of course be only her friend, nor view and review her altogether from the standpoint of mere friendship. Sooner or later his thoughts always turned to the first great trouble between them, that trouble which had fallen upon him, innocent and undeserving, out of a clear sky, and the dread of whose recrudescence or recurrence always lurked deep in his being, ready to leap up without warning, and, like the knowledge of some dreadful inh...« less