He went back to his seat with swaggering bravado, and made especial efforts to break more of the few slight rules Henrietta had imposed on the scholars. He hoped she would notice and expel him. He hated school and wanted to be free to lead a man's life.
“It will be all the better for him,” Henrietta told herself, excusing herself, during the short hours of courtship to which she subjected him before they “eloped.”
“I can make something out of him and if I do not he will go to ruin. He is headed that way and there is no one to stop him if I do not.”
She convinced herself that this was so. As for Freeman, in his egotism he imagined he was doing the courting. He imagined it was he proposed the elopement. He felt he was a clever, sophisticated man of the world to be able to annex the love of this rather magnificent woman, to make her throw her arms around him and weep wildly on his shoulder.
He strutted considerably among the other cheap dandies of the town for a few days, and then they eloped, if abducting a silly youth can be called eloping, and were married. It made a great row in the town, of course, and Freeman and Henrietta did not dare to return.
The triumph of feeling that her friends would find all she had said in her letters was the truth did not last long. She tried to coax Freeman to go to work, so that they might live the life of a respectable married couple, but Todder was of little account and was made less so by a growing feeling that somehow Henrietta had played a trick on him, and by his early discovery that she was a liar. What the trick was he did not bother to make sure, but he felt that it was her fault that they were married and that it was her business now to take care of him.
Henrietta was contrite of heart beyond all question. She felt that she had done Freeman a vast and irreparable wrong, and, as he became more and more worthless, she blamed herself and not him. Whatever he was and however he acted it was her duty to bear with him and protect him.
The years had been miserable ones. The pair had reached some low depths—penniless days—but at last Henrietta had won her way into the Riverbank schools under her assumed name of Henrietta Bates, posing as an unmarried woman.
This was the Henrietta who left Miss Susan pacified and went up to see Lem. She carried a bag of the largest, yellowest oranges she had been able to buy. She was in most respects the kindest and most thoughtful of women. She was liked and respected by all. She had seemed, a few days earlier, the safest and happiest of women. Now her whole world seemed about to topple upon her from all sides, crushing her in a chaos of disgrace and infamy.