“Was she so beautiful?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“And are you still unchanged in giving her the supreme place that you did give her from the moment you first saw her?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“Oh, Harold,” exclaimed the girl, “I sometimes think it might have turned out differently if the marriage had not been so rash and sudden.”
He took a seat near her, and continued to look at her as he said:
“It could have made no difference to me. You don’t fully understand it, Martha. It is impossible that you should. I knew, the day I met her, that I had been set apart and saved for her. I know it now. It was the kind of gravitation that comes once in a life.”
“Then you do not regret it?”
“For myself, not in the least. She was my wife for a month. What I have gone through since is a small price to pay for that. But when I think of what it has cost her—that most delicate of women—to face the odium of it—that superb woman’s life shadowed by the vulgarity of a suddenly ruptured marriage; and—deeper than that!—to have her best life maimed forever—God! I curse the day that I was born!”
“And what has she brought on you, I’d like to know?” cried Martha. “It was she who cast you off—not you her. Ah, Harold, if she had been the woman she should have been, she never could have done it!”