This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a "heart", and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer..
Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September.
Paris, you see, was our home.
Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English.
I don\'t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people.
I had known the shallows.
Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart.
This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever.
My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.
We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy-or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a Good glove\'s with your hand.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard
