The Three Fates

by F. Marion Crawford

“Why not? But seriously, we can do a great deal more than you fancy—provided, as you say, that we do not go in for champagne every day, and keep horses and all that.”

“I think we shall have more champagne and horses than other things,” Mamie answered with a laugh. “Mamma is going to keep a carriage for me, as well as my dear old riding horse, and papa told me not to let you buy any wine, because there was some of that particular kind you like on the way out. Between you and me, I do not think they really expect us to be in the least economical, though mamma is always talking about it.”

She was very happy and it was impossible for her to cloud the future by the idea of being deprived of any of the luxury to which she had always been accustomed. She knew in her heart that she was both willing and able to undergo any privation for George’s sake, but it would have been unlike her to talk of what she would or could do when there was no immediate prospect of doing it. Her chief thought was to make her husband’s house comfortable, and if she knew something of the art from having watched her mother, she knew also that comfort, as she understood it, required a very free use of money. George knew it, too, since he had been brought up in luxury and had been deprived of it at the age when such things are most keenly felt. The terrible, noiseless, hourly expenditure that he had seen in Totty’s house made the exiguity of his own resources particularly apparent to his judgment.

“Good-bye, dear old place!” cried the young girl, as they stood on the verandah at dusk, before going in to dress for dinner. She threw kisses with her fingers at the garden and at the trees.

George stood by her side in silence, gazing out at the dim outline of the distant hills beyond the river.

“Are you not sorry to leave it all?” Mamie asked.

“Very sorry,” he answered, as though not knowing what he said. Then he stooped, and kissed her small white face, and they both went in.

That night George sat up late in his room, looking over the manuscript that had grown under his hand during the summer months. It was all but finished and he intended to write the last chapter in New York, but it interested him to look through it before leaving the surroundings in which it had been written. What most struck him in the work was the care with which it was done. It was not a very imaginative book, but it was remarkable for its truth and clearness of style. He wondered at the coldness of certain scenes, which in his first conception of the story had promised to be the most dramatic. He wondered still more at the success with which he had handled points which in themselves seemed to be far from attractive to the novelist. His conversations were better than they had formerly been, but the love scenes were unsatisfactory, and he determined that he would re-write some of them. The whole book looked too truthful and too little enthusiastic to him, now, though he fancied that he had passed through moments of enthusiasm while he was writing it. On the whole, it was a disappointment to himself, and he believed that others would be disappointed likewise. He asked himself what Johnson would think of it, and made up his mind to abide by his opinion. Vaguely too, as one sometimes longs to see again a book once read, he wished that he might have Constance’s criticism and advice, though he was conscious at the same time that it was not the sort of story she would have liked.

Two days later, he found himself once more in his little room in his father’s house. The old gentleman received the news of the engagement in silence. He had guessed that matters would terminate as they had, and the prospect had given him little satisfaction. He thought that the alliance would probably cut him off from his son’s society, and he was inwardly hurt that George should seem indifferent to the fact. But he said nothing. From the worldly point of view the marriage was a brilliant one, and it meant that George must ultimately be a rich man. His future at least was provided for.

George found Johnson hard at work, as usual, and if possible paler and more in earnest than before. He had taken a week’s holiday during the hottest part of the summer, but with that exception had never relaxed in his astounding industry since they had last met.