“You shall be mine,” said the sorceress, “if I may take you.”
“You may do anything you like,” replied Jubal.
The girl took him at his word and they married. First of all he taught her to sing and play, and then he gave her everything she asked for. But since was a sorceress, she always wanted the things which he most objected to giving to her, and so, gradually, she wrested his will from him and made him her slave.
One fine day Mrs. Jubal had become a great singer, so great that when the audience called “Jubal!” it was not Mr. but Mrs. Jubal who took the call.
Jubal, of course, longed to regain his former position, but he scorned to do it at his wife’s expense.
The world began to forget him.
The brilliant circle of friends who had surrounded Mr. Jubal in his bachelor chambers now surrounded his wife, for it was she who was “Jubal.”
Nobody wanted to talk to him or drink with him, and when he attempted to join in the conversation, nobody listened to his remarks; it was just as if he were not present, and his wife was treated as if she were an unmarried woman.
Then Mr. Jubal grew very lonely, and in his loneliness he began to frequent the cafes.
One evening he was at a restaurant, trying to find somebody to talk to, and ready to talk to anybody willing to listen to him. All at once he caught sight of his old friend the commercial traveller, sitting at a table by himself, evidently very bored. “Thank goodness,” he thought, “here’s somebody to spend an hour with—it’s old Lundberg.”