Two years had passed, she told Janet, since Percival Houghton came to the United States. He was a young Englishman, well connected, who had gained an immense vogue as an illustrator. He was said to have "isolated" several rare types of French and English female beauty, and fabulous sums had been paid for his portrait studies in pastel. His press agent having in advance widely advertised the artist's announced purpose of adding the American girl to his pictorial conquests, his arrival was extremely good copy for the newspapers.
Hutchins Burley, with an eye to the Evening Chronicle's large feminine clientele, did not let the opportunity slip by. He assigned Cornelia, then attached to his paper, to interview the ambitious Englishman. In her own words, "she went, she saw, she conquered."
After the flattering notice in the Chronicle, Percival Houghton sought her out and attended her devotedly. Cornelia dwelt on the warm friendship that sprang up between them and on her own quick subjection to his great personal charm.
"He was a wonderful man, Araminta. He had a great leonine head with wild flowing locks; there was fire in his eye and music in his voice; and he had that imperious way with him that opens a path straight to a woman's heart."
The week before his departure, he made an avowal of his passion. And she was in a paradise of ecstasy until the next day, when he sent her by mail a piece of information he had not had the courage to give her in person. He confessed to a wife and two children living in England. In a moment of impetuous boyish idealism—like Shelley's, he said—he had married a girl who was intellectually (though not financially) his inferior. Worst of all, she shared none of his tastes or aspirations. He assured Cornelia that every day of his married existence had been a lifetime of exquisite torture.
This confession, Janet heard, was the prelude to many hours of bitter torment. Cornelia said that the one good outcome of this evil period was that she began to think of the realities of life for the first time. She was led to question the moral conventions which she had always taken for granted and which, she now saw, encrusted the conduct of most of the people around her. Under the tutelage of Percival Houghton, who proclaimed himself a free thinker, as well as a free lover, she became alive to the absurdity of regarding the conventions of an age as immutable laws for all time.
Naturally, at this time, her logic was concentrated on the convention of marriage.
Percival read out many passages from the great writers of today—continued Cornelia—from Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis and Gilbert Cannan; and these passages exposed the unalterable belief of the writers that marriage, in its existing form, was wrong, conclusively and crushingly wrong.
Wrong, she hastened to explain, in so far as it was a contract that was held to be binding even after the death of the love on which the contract was based.
She developed the logic of the situation at some length in arguments with which Janet was greatly impressed.