He resolved that the one safe step was to get Persis safely married at once and take her away from all of her acquaintances. Aboard his yacht would be one secure asylum. When they tired of that they could travel Europe, and the moment any old friend appeared he could decamp with her overnight.
He chuckled triumphantly over this plot, and set about its perfection. He rejoiced to be in a position to compel Persis by way of her father's necessities. The support he had advanced to the "old flub" he could threaten to withdraw unless the wedding were hastened. That would clinch it.
And then he glowed with the imagined scenes of the honeymoon. Persis might not love him as he wished, but he would have her for his own. He would have as much of her as any man could be sure of in possessing a woman. He knew he was not handsome, but he knew handsome men whose homely wives were notoriously false to them. Did he not know of wild romances that had ended in mutual contempt? Did he not know of unpromising beginnings that had ended in happiness? Monogamy was a gamble at best. And at worst he should have Persis for his own for a while.
CHAPTER XLVII
WHEN Willie's mother left him in the aftermath of his nightmare she went to pay her duty call on Persis, to welcome her formally into the family and proffer her the use of the family name.
There was the most gleaming cordiality on the surface of their meeting, but the depths of both streams were a trifle murky. Willie's mother understood now why her own husband's fierce old mother, known as "Medusa" Enslee, had received her with such constraint on a similar occasion. That mother had had to give up part of her name, too, and step back from being queen to being queen-mother, with endless confusion in the newspapers, the invitations, the correspondence, and the gossip.
The present Mrs. Enslee felt now a sympathy for the old woman she had hated. But it crowded out the sympathy she should have felt for Persis, who was suffering what she had suffered as a young-woman-afraid-of-her-mother-in-law.
It was bitter for Willie's mother, still beautiful, feeling herself as young as ever, to realize that henceforth she must be the "the elder," or, worse yet, the "old Mrs. Enslee." Perhaps in a year or two a grandmother! It would be just like Persis to hasten that ghastly day.
At present Persis was not thinking of motherhood. She would have called it quite a ghastly day herself—one to be postponed by every ingenuity and subtlety known to American womanhood. She was thinking of her new name.