An Ambitious Man

Then he looked about among his early friends who had married, as

nearly all the young men of the middle classes in America do marry,

for love, or what they believed to be love. There was Tom Somers--a

splendid lad, full of life, hope and ambition when he married Carrie

Towne, the prettiest girl in Vandalia. Well, what was he now, after

seven years? A broken-spirited man, with a sickly, complaining wife

and a brood of ill-clad children. Harry Walters, the most infatuated

lover he had ever seen, was divorced after five years of discordant

marriage.

Charlie St Clair was flagrantly unfaithful to the girl he had pursued

three years with his ardent wooings before she yielded to his suit.

Certainly none of these love marriages were examples for him to

follow. And in the midst of these reveries and reflections, Preston

Cheney came to Beryngford, and met Sylvester Lawrence and his

daughter Mabel. He met also Berene Dumont. Had he not met the

latter woman he would not have succumbed--so soon at least--to the

temptation held out by the former to advance his ambitious aims.

He would have hesitated, considered, and reconsidered, and without

doubt his better nature and his good taste would have prevailed. But

when fate threw Berene Dumont in his way, and circumstances brought

about his close associations with her for many months, there seemed

but one way of escape from the Scylla of his desires, and that was to

the Charybdis of a marriage with Miss Lawrence.

Miss Lawrence was not aware of the part Berene Dumont had played in

her engagement, but she knew perfectly the part her father's

influence and wealth had played; but she was quite content with

affairs as they were, and it mattered little to her what had brought

them about. To be married, rather than to be loved, had been her

ambition since she left school; being incapable of loving, she was

incapable of appreciating the passion in any of its phases. It had

always seemed to her that a great deal of nonsense was written and

talked about love. She thought demonstrative people very vulgar, and

believed kissing a means of conveying germs of disease.

But to be a married woman, with an establishment of her own, and a

husband to exhibit to her friends, was necessary to the maintenance

of her pride.

When Miss Lawrence's mother, a nervous invalid, was informed of her

daughter's engagement, she burst into tears, as over a lamb offered

on the altar of sacrifice; and Judge Lawrence pressed a kiss on the

lobe of Mabel's left ear which she offered him, and told her she had

won a prize in the market. But as he sat alone over his cigar that

night, he sighed heavily, and said to himself, "Poor fellow, I wish

Mabel were not so much like her mother."