“And a wife to share his anxieties?”
“H’m—I don’t know that. Perhaps it would help.”
He knocked the ash off his cigar, got up and began pacing slowly up and down the long room.
“That’s just the difference between us, Fred. You’d weigh the woman you thought of marrying in those silly scales of yours, and if you found her short weight in any particular would fight shy. I’ve human impulses and follow them. When they get me into a mess I get out of it as well as I can. You spend so much of time in avoiding messes that you’ll never get into anything else.”
“I don’t seem to have many impulses left.”
“Rats! You don’t know anything about yourself—you analytical gents never do. Or else, which I suspect is more true, you don’t want anyone else to know you have just ordinary, human impulses. I believe you’re a sentimental old humbug. Come to bed.”
CHAPTER VIII
Marian understood that if her bargain with Maddison was to last, it must be made satisfying to him as well as to herself. She did not think that because the first skirmish had been won the remainder of the campaign would be easy and necessarily victorious. She rejoiced in having won her freedom from the shackles of matrimony, but did not overlook the fact that her foothold in her new world was precarious, and that a single false step might bring her to trouble far worse than that from which she had escaped.
Inexperience was her chief weakness. Intuition, impulse and insight she possessed in high degree, but these alone would not suffice her, would not enable her to make her new position unassailable. It was certain, once the first rush of pleasurable emotion was over, that Maddison would begin to weigh the consequences of what he had done, that he would question whether stress of circumstances had not driven him to act foolishly in tying himself so closely to her. He would study her keenly to find out whether she was really charming or only appeared so to him. The woman desired is so often more desirable than the woman won. It must be her unremitting task never to disappoint him in any way, and in this the chief difficulty would be to know where to draw the line between the utter submission to his will which might lead to rapid satiation and the making it difficult for him to gain his every point without feeling that he was not being given all that he was paying for. She must make her hold upon him so tight that there would be no chance of his easily loosening it before she herself might desire to be free. She determined that no avoidable rashness or haste should endanger the future.