Wealth? they had it. Position? that was theirs
also. Consideration? ah, what consideration had I to give? I turned
from them with distaste.
"My cousin Evelyn gave me no help. She was a proud woman and loved my
money and my expectations as much as she did me.
"'If you must marry another woman to retain your wealth, marry, said
she, 'but do not marry one of my associates. I will have no rival in
my own empire; your wife must be a plainer and a less aspiring woman
than Evelyn Blake. Yet do not discredit your name, --which is mine,'
she would always add.
"Meanwhile the days flew by. If my own conscience had allowed me to
forget the fact, my father's eagerly inquiring, but sternly
unrelenting gaze as I came each evening to his bedside, would have
kept it sufficiently in my mind. I began to feel like one in the
power of some huge crushing machine whose slowly descending weight he
in vain endeavors to escape.
"How or when the thought of Luttra first crossed my mind I cannot say.
At first I recoiled at the suggestion and put it away from me in
disdain; but it ever recurred and with it so many arguments in her
favor that before long I found myself regarding it as a refuge. To be
sure she was a waif and a stray, but that seemed to be the kind of
wife demanded of me.
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