The Fighting Chance

"I will keep it--in trust," he said, "until you give yourself with it."

But she only shook her head wearily, withdrawing her hands from his, and for a time they sat silent, eyes apart.

Then--"There is another reason," she said wistfully.

He looked up at her, hesitated, and--"My habits?" he asked simply.

"Yes."

"I have them in check."

"Are you--certain?"

"I think I may be--now."

"Yet," she said timidly, "you lost one fight--since you knew me."

The dull red mantling his face wrung her heart. She turned impulsively and laid both hands on his shoulders. "That chance I would take, with all its uncertainty, all the dread inheritance you have come into. I love you enough for that; and if it turned out that--that you could not stem the tide, even with me to face it with you; and if the pity of it, the grief of it, killed me, I would take that chance--if you loved me through it all. … But there is something else. Hush; let me have my say while I find the words--something else you do not understand. … Turn your face a little; please don't look at me. This is what you do not know--that, in three generations, every woman of my race has--gone wrong. … Every one! and I am beginning--with such a marriage! … deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of the race record behind me.

"Once, when I knew nothing--before I--I met you--I believed such a marriage would not only permit me mental tranquillity, but safely anchor me in the harbour of convention, leaving me free to become what I am fashioned to become--autocrat and arbiter in my own world. And now! and now! I don't know--truly I don't know what I may become. Your love forces my hand. I am displaying all the shallowness, falseness, pettiness, all the mean, and cruel and callous character which must be truly my real self. … Only I shall not marry you! You are not to run the risk of what I might prove to be when I remember in bitterness all I have renounced. If I married you I should remember, unreconciled, what you cost me. Better for you and for me that I marry him, and let him bear with me when I remember that he cost me you!"

She bent over, almost double, closing her eyes with small clenched hands; and he saw the ring shimmering in the sunshine, and her hair, heavily, densely gold, and the white nape of her neck, and the tiny close-set ears, and the curved softness of cheek and chin; every smooth, childlike contour and mould--rounded arms, slim, flowing lines of body and limb--all valued at many millions by her as her own appraiser.