These terrible words, which filled the flesh of the miser with mortification, aroused in the lover the frenzy of the gambler. He felt that he was throwing his all to the winds and the thought intoxicated him.
"Sheila," he cried, lifting his face, "do what you want! I love you—only you!"
She bent her head hurriedly. There were in her eyes two things she did not dare let him see, the pride of her triumph and that bewildered pity which comes only to the utter victors.
CHAPTER XII BOFINGER IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING
Fargus, as all those who are forced to surrender without conditions, retained a reservation,—he counted on the future. His nature was too simple and intense to fathom the complexities of marriage. He had the fierce, half-savage conception that the woman resigned her ascendancy when she gave herself into his power. He conceived of woman as a tyrant before marriage and a suppliant ever after. For him the physical submission carried all with it. So even in his surrender he believed that time would restore the balance in his favor.
Sheila, on the contrary, had well understood that the first weeks of marriage must be a battle on which would hinge the fortunes of her whole life. She had this advantage, that Fargus was utterly unprepared and ignorant of the thousand agilities of her sex. She had subdued him by taking him by surprise, but she was not the dupe of her victory. She knew where the danger lay, divining the secret thoughts of her husband. The problem with her was to forever cheat his infatuation. She submitted but she did not give herself to him.
The history of these unending skirmishes, open or ambushed, seldom rising to the dignity of a conflict, was an uninterrupted record of successes for the woman. Fargus, who had counted on the future, found himself each day more willingly subjugated. This infatuation that overturned all his ideas of conduct gave to his love the mad aspect of a forbidden passion. Each time that he ceded to Sheila he had a moment of horror, and then that delirious access of folly and passion which comes only to the man who loves and ruins himself.