Well, she did marry him, and she did not regret it—nor did he.
To me it is a wonder that she did not. For he had done the threatened newspapering so well that already upon their arrival at the steamer all the passengers were lined up to await them. And the smile they got there followed them to Europe, and into the most remote corners of the globe where they penetrated to escape it. It became at last a smile of contempt. And he began to understand that it was for him alone and that the world had exempted his wife from it.
“I’m glad for that,” he told her. “If I am to go about the world a cad and a fool, to be laughed at—I am glad that you are—”
“To be pitied as your victim?” laughed his happy wife. “No. I don’t want anything that is not yours, and you shall have nothing that is not mine.”
If they escaped it for a day, they never did for two. Always the servants were in line where they arrived, with the expectation of them in their banal faces. But always she was excepted.
“I wish I could rise with you,” sighed Ravant, whimsically. “I hate to be separated from you. But they won’t have me, and they won’t do without you. I suppose my claws still show somewhere.”
“Whither I go, you shall go,” his wife threatened. “I am too happy—that is what the world sees. What care I—for anything but joy and you!”
She kissed Ravant.
But presently her “beauty” and her “magnetism” began to be paragraphic with him in the newspapers—of which he said he was glad, and was not.
“Beloved,” he told her, “it is a pity you married me.”