If I cherished her as my own soul, what could I give her back, who had given herself to me?
I said, "I will make you the happiest woman who was ever beloved by man upon this earth."
"But you have," she whispered, lifting her dear face. "It is worth being alive for, if it came to an end to-morrow."
"Love has no end," I cried. "Happiness is life. It cannot die. It has an immortal soul. If ever I make you sad, if I am untender to you,—may God strike me"—
"Hush," she cried, clinging to me, and closing my lips with a kiss for which I would have died; "Hush, love! hush!"
CHAPTER III.
It ought to be said, at this point in my story, that I had never been what would be called an even-tempered man. Truth to tell, I was a spoiled boy. My mother was a saint, but she was a soft-hearted one. My father was a scholar. Like many another boy of decided individuality, I came up anyhow. Nobody managed me. At an early age my profession made it my duty to manage everybody else. I had a nervous temperament to start on; neither my training nor my occupation had poised it. I do not think I was malicious nor even ill-natured. As men go, I was perhaps a kind man. The thing which I am trying to say is, that I was an irritable one.
As I look back upon the whole subject I can see, from my present point of view, that this irritability had seldom struck me as a personal disadvantage. I do not think it usually makes that impression upon temperaments similarly vitiated. As nearly as I can remember, I thought of myself rather as the possessor of an eccentricity, than as the victim of a vice. My father was an overworked college professor,—a quick-tempered man; my mother,—so he told me with streaming tears, upon the day that he buried her,—my mother never spoke one irritated word to him in all her life: he had chafed and she had soothed, he had slashed and she had healed, from the beginning to the end of their days together. A boy imitates for so many years before he reflects, that the liberty to say what one felt like saying appeared to me a mere identification of sex long before it occurred to me that mine might not be the only sex endowed by nature with this form of expression. I regarded it as one regards a beard, or a waistcoat,—simple signs of the variation of species.
My mother—Heaven rest her sweet soul—did not, that I recall, obviously oppose me in this view. After the time of the first moustache she obeyed her son, as she had obeyed her husband.