“Confound your fickle soul!” muttered
Ackland. “I punished her as she did not
deserve; and I risked more than life in doing so.
If her heart had not been as good as gold and as kind
as Heaven she never would have looked at me again.”
Ackland is quite as indifferent to the sex as ever,
but Eva has never complained that he was cold to her.
The Christmas holidays had come, and with them a welcome
vacation for Hedley Marstern. Although as yet
a briefless young lawyer, he had a case in hand which
absorbed many of his thoughts—the conflicting
claims of two young women in his native village on
the Hudson. It must not be imagined that the
young women were pressing their claims except as they
did so unconsciously, by virtue of their sex and various
charms. Nevertheless, Marstern was not the first
lawyer who had clients over whom midnight oil was burned,
they remaining unaware of the fact.
If not yet a constitutional attorney, he was at least
constitutionally one. Falling helplessly in love
with one girl simplifies matters. There are no
distracting pros and cons— nothing required
but a concentration of faculties to win the enslaver,
and so achieve mastery. Marstern did not appear
amenable to the subtle influences which blind the
eyes and dethrone reason, inspiring in its place an
overwhelming impulse to capture a fortuitous girl
because (to a heated imagination) she surpasses all
her sex. Indeed, he was level-headed enough to
believe that he would never capture any such girl;
but he hoped to secure one who promised to make as
good a wife as he would try to be a husband, and with
a fair amount of self-esteem, he was conscious of
imperfections. Therefore, instead of fancying
that any of his fair acquaintances were angels, he
had deliberately and, as some may think, in a very
cold-blooded fashion, endeavored to discover what
they actually were. He had observed that a good
deal of prose followed the poetry of wooing and the
lunacy of the honeymoon; and he thought it might be
well to criticise a little before marriage as well
as after it.
There were a number of charming girls in the social
circle of his native town; and he had, during later
years, made himself quite impartially agreeable to
them. Indeed, without much effort on his part
he had become what is known as a general favorite.
He had been too diligent a student to become a society
man, but was ready enough in vacation periods to make
the most of every country frolic, and even on great
occasions to rush up from the city and return at some
unearthly hour in the morning when his partners in
the dance were not half through their dreams.
While on these occasions he had shared in the prevailing
hilarity, he nevertheless had the presentiment that
some one of the laughing, light-footed girls would
one day pour his coffee and send him to his office
in either a good or a bad mood to grapple with the
