He had all his wits about him, and filled with a sudden sense of the electric shock which Bertha’s finger-point had sent through him on the day of Ethel’s conversation with her, he gathered up (with a tingling sense of shame) all that they together had one day said of him, as being “a fool not worth mothering.”
The blood surged through his brain, bubbling up cleansingly through all the stagnant cells, bringing him in its parts and as a whole, a memory of the things which had been going on about him for the five years of double-consciousness through which he had lived.
Later in the day he felt strangely happy, and clear-headed and proud, and ready for life; as if he had been assured by competent judges that he was really a much more level-headed man, and had always been more level-headed, with a much clearer eye for the main point at stake, than anything in his stultified life heretofore had proved.
He saw perfectly well that the story of his life could not end here amid the congratulations of his friends over his return to health, and their assurances in relation to Mrs. Mancredo that he was a lucky fellow, with a wife possessed of such faithfulness and maturity of youthful power. For of course the story that she was his wife, and all the rest of it, had gotten abroad. And Reginald knew it had.
Perhaps if his mental grasp as to moral relations had been as bewildered as it was when, five years before, he regularly turned to his “drinks” in order to quiet his perplexities, he would have accepted the congratulations and slipped along the lines as publicly expected of him. But five years’ immersion in the blithesome delights of a world where righteousness reigned, had fortified Reginald in his inherent love of truth and straightforward dealing, and had enabled him to adopt as theories to be immediately practicalized, the methods of honor (founded on simplicity and courage) toward which the Dakshas aspired.
So when a few days later he found Alitza had legally passed over to him a good little fortune, and had taken steps to secure (on some of the many available pleas) a legal release from the results of that marriage-ceremony, he said, cheerfully and blithely: “That’s all right.” And when he further learned that Alitza had deeded a further amount of wealth to Bertha Gemacht, he said: “That’s all wrong; I won’t allow it. I hope to marry her, and so right up things. And the other money is enough for both of us,” showing that, as Alitza said to herself, “five years, even in the society of angels, could not rid the Grove blood of the thought that a man can cast off a woman when he chooses, and then marry her when he gets ready; but that, having married her, such a man felt it was better for him that she should possess as little of that legal tender called money, as possible; seeing (to the Grove notion of things) it was sum and substance of independence. She told Ethel that the irrepressible young hoodlum stood confessed at this touchstone, as far as his relations to what he would have called ‘this sort of a woman’ were concerned. Then she said to Grove: “It seems difficult for you to understand that you have nothing to do with what money someone else may choose to give to a third person, let that third person be whom it may.” For quarrel these two people must, by nature. And glad Alitza was that she had always kept him beyond arm’s length, and now had not let her sympathy with his sickness, or her joy at his recovery, cause her to abbreviate the distance between their ineradicable antagonisms.
“This is a different case,” said he.
“All cases are alike here, for all are individuals,” said she.
“But—she—she’s to be my wife.”
“That’s what you don’t yet know,” said Alitza. “Pah, it takes more than a visit to paradise to take that sort of stuff out of your brains. I see the use of purgatory now. You ought to have gone there and staid longer. We’ve all agreed to let you drop, the next time you knock yourself to pieces. So look out!”