“Wouldn’t you think there was something lacking in a man who couldn’t fall in love with her at sight?”
“Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow,” was the cool-voiced rejoinder. “Love won’t always go where it is sent—or come when it is called.”
It all came out then; the story of the family alliance and agreement, planned while he and Eugenia were mere babes in arms; its tacit acceptance by both as they grew up; his own abnormal and inexcusable distaste for it and rebellion against it—an attitude which, he had every reason to believe, was not shared by Eugenia.
“You know something about my ratty life in the past, Jean,” he went on. “While I was doing my best to break all of the Ten Commandments, the thing fell down of its own weight, naturally. I wasn’t an ‘eligible,’ even in society’s rather loose interpretation of the word. But now——”
“But now you are no longer living that kind of a life, and you are a rich man,” she finished for him. “You are going to marry her?”
“It is up to me, isn’t it?”
“No. I should say a thousand times, no.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“Because you couldn’t do her a greater wrong than by marrying her when you don’t love her.”
“Don’t you think I could make her happy?”