“Yes, I have got a fit of it. I suppose that she has not been out of my mind for an hour altogether during the last forty-eight hours. Talk of being haunted by a dead person, it is infinitely worse being haunted by a living one.”
“I am very sorry for you, dear.”
“Do you suppose, Mildred, that this will go on for all my life, that I shall always be at the mercy of these bitter memories and thoughts?”
“I don’t know, Arthur. I hope not.”
“I wish I were dead—I wish I were dead,” he broke out, passionately. “She has destroyed my life, all that was happy in me is dead, only my body lives on. I am sure I don’t know, Mildred, how you can care for anything so worthless.”
She kissed him, and answered,
“Dearest, I had rather love you as you are than any other man alive. Time does wonders; perhaps in time you will get over it. Oh! Arthur, when I think of what she has made you, and what you might have been if you had never known her, I long to tell that woman all my mind. But you must be a man, dear; it is weak to give way to a mad passion, such as this is now. Try to think of something else; work at something.”
“I have no heart for it, Mildred, I don’t feel as though I could work; and, if you cannot make me forget, I am sure I do not know what will.”
Mildred sighed, and did not answer. Though she spoke hopefully about it to him, she had little faith in his getting over his passion for Angela now. Either she must marry him as he was, or else let him go altogether; but which? The struggle between her affection and her idea of duty was very sore, and as yet she could come to no conclusion.
One thing there was that troubled her considerably, and this was that, though Madeira was almost empty, there were enough people in it to get up a good deal of gossip about herself and Arthur. Now, it would have been difficult to find anybody more entirely careless of the judgments of society than Mildred, more especially as her great wealth and general popularity protected her from slights. But, for all her oddities, she was a thorough woman of the world; and she knew, none better, that, in pursuance of an almost invariable natural law, there is nothing that lowers a woman so much in the estimation of a man as the knowledge that she is talked about, even though he himself is the cause of the talk. This may be both illogical and unjust, but it is, none the less, true.