"Yes—but that doesn't matter. I am often alone. I prop up a book against a glass candlestick and the dinner is gone before I am aware of it."
"It might as well be sawdust, for all you know," laughed Gertrude.
"So it might," I told her, "except that Griselda can do better than sawdust. I might, of course," I added, "call up Dibdin and have him feast with me."
"Your trampy friend," commented Gertrude. "Yes, better do it. I don't like to think of you so much alone."
"Now, that is very sweet of you, my dear. I'll do exactly that."
Her cool lips touched mine for an instant and she was gone.
CHAPTER II
To my shame I must record that, once I was alone, the appalling fact of marriage overwhelmed me like a landslide. With a sense of suffocation and wild struggle I longed to do in earnest what I had threatened to do in jest, to run away, blindly, madly, anywhere, to freedom, as far as ever I could go.
When I should have been rejoicing, I desired, in a manner, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. I thought upon Lincoln, a brave man if ever one there was, who had paled before the thought of marriage and wrote consoling letters to another in similar case. When I ought to have been feeling at my most virile, I felt unmanned.
Yet, was I a boy to be a prey to these emotions? At twenty-nine surely a man should know his own mind and be in possession of himself. Never before had I doubted my way in life. In a world where every one who has no money proceeds with energy to make it, and every one who has a little tirelessly labors to acquire more, I had wittingly and of full purpose turned my life away from the market place and toward a studious devotion to books. On my compact income of less than two hundred and fifty dollars monthly left me by generous parents, I was able to maintain my modest apartment in Twelfth Street and to live a life, purposeless in the eyes of some, no doubt, but which to me is priceless.