"
"You would have me stop _now_--before I have told you of the only shred
of triumph to which I may lay claim!" she protested. "Oh, you may be
sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I
swear before my God that I didn't realize it then, until it was too
late. To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have
been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem--that I should
marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a
deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a
duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the
hands of those I trusted. Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or
suspect that I was sacrificing _myself_; at no time, blind though you
may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was
voluntarily going. No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect
that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in
finance--so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I
felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one's
life. And no hint of it came until the last of the few words were spoken
which made us man and wife, and then I saw in John Graham's eyes
something which I had never seen there before.
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