By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion, and, a figure.
He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his name.
Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no ’count, and her mother was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had pictured to herself a home, 9 happiness, and a life of plenty, but she held herself at the highest price a woman demands.
That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days mansion in Gage.
There he installed her with everything he thought she needed, and—pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no ’count. Augustus Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no chance rose to the heights of his wife’s mental demands.
Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline’s wife. Those women had not proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.
“I want to talk learning,” she told herself, “and they talk hairpins and dirty dishes and Bill-don’t-behave!”
Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her down and gone back to the grass widow’s the night before. Nelia considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.
In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too, 10 moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.
Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and when Gus Carline returned from the widow’s one day he found that Nelia was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her, and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was willing to do anything she asked.