“Yes, dear, and I feel it still. They will be all just as fond of me at home, though I am your wife.”
“At home! It is no longer your home.”
“No, I have a home of my own now. A new home, with new love there to live on; and an old home, with the old love to think of.”
“A new home instead of an old one, a poor home instead of a rich one—a home where the cry of the sorrow and suffering of the world will reach you, for one in which you had—”
“In which I had not you, dear. There now, that was my purchase. I set my mind on having you—buying you, as that is your word. I have paid my price, and got my bargain, and—you know, I was always an oddity, and rather willful, am content with it.”
“Yes, Mary, you have bought me, and you little know, dearest, what you have bought. I can scarcely bear my own selfishness at times when I think of what your life might have been had I left you alone, and what it must be with me.”
“And what might it have been, dear?”
“Why, you might have married some man with plenty of money, who could have given you everything to which you have been used.”
“I shall begin to think that you believe in luxuries, after all, if you go on making so much of them. You must not go on preaching one thing and practicing another. I am a convert to your preaching, and believe in the misery of multiplying artificial wants. Your wife must have none.”
“Yes, but wealth and position are not to be despised. I feel that, now that it is all done past recall, and I have to think of you. But the loss of them is a mere nothing to what you will have to go through.”