Her weakness maddened me. I grew to hate her. If she had only had enough spirit to quarrel with me, but that was the secret of it; she had no spirit until it was too late.
Just before this I met Miss Chamberlain. I found that I had pleased her fancy and I concluded to marry.
It mattered little that I was not in love; I had long since learned that love was merely the effect of some pleasing sensation, which some persons, like some music, produce on us, that shortly wears itself out.
I thought it better to marry where there was no feeling than where there was. For the sensation of love is sure to die, leaving an unsupportable weariness caused by its own emotion. Where there is no such feeling, there is no such result to fear.
I never expected any trouble from Lucille.
But I reckoned without my host. Although I endeavored to keep my engagement secret, yet a line to the effect that I was to marry Miss Chamberlain, reached print. Lucille, though hardly in society, always read society notes. She read that one.
She became a tigress—a devil. Isn’t it queer that a weak woman always has an ungovernable temper? Expecting nothing more than a few tears from her, I answered carelessly, and she grew infuriated. Of course, I was astonished. She accused me of falseness and demanded that I deny the report over my own name and marry her immediately, or she would seek Miss Chamberlain and lay before her what she pleased to call my baseness.
I was determined to marry.
It meant wealth, a better social position, power, and a wife that at least I would be proud of. I had cherished such an idea of marriage since I was a boy, and I was resolved that nothing should balk me now that it was in my grasp.
I was determined to take fate into my own hands.