“Dearest,” he said, “you must not say that; for the next time I come it will be to take you away from Macochee.”
“Will it?” she whispered.
“Yes; and it can’t be long now. How we have had to wait!”
“Yes,” she repeated, “how we have had to wait!”
CHAPTER XXXII
AT LAST
Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he had the money and the position to warrant his marrying, he never would have married at all.
Just what moved him to take the decisive step he did he would have found it hard to tell. He had grown accustomed to the life he was living in Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment; he no longer regretted Macochee and he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had ever done for him was to refuse him a place within its borders. As he looked back at all the plans he had formed, he marveled at their number, but he marveled more that he should have had such regret in the failure of all of them; he was glad now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded his life would have been diverted into other channels, and it gave him a kind of fear when he tried to imagine his life in those other channels; he could see himself in those relations only as some other identity, and it gave him a gruesome feeling to do this.
Not that he was satisfied with himself or his surroundings; he did not like newspaper work, and he did not like Chicago very well. He was determined to get out of newspaper work at any rate, and while he could not yet clearly see a way of getting into the law, he had a calm assurance that he would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in this hope by saying:
“A man can’t control circumstances; they control him; but sometimes he can dodge them, and, after all, every sincere prayer is answered.”
During the winter that followed the summer when he had paid his visit to his home he worked hard at the law, spending in study the hours the other men on his newspaper spent in their dissipations, and in the spring he stole away almost secretly to Springfield, took the examination, and was admitted to the bar.