The Two Destinies

So the letter concluded.

I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and thoroughly unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had done, she had done wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first place, to have married at all. It was wrong of her to contemplate receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even if his lawful wife had died in the interval. It was wrong of her to return my letter of introduction, after I had given myself the trouble of altering it to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take an absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration, and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van Brandt himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her to sign her Christian name in initial only. Here I was, passionately in love with a woman, and not knowing by what fond name to identify her in my thoughts! "M. Van Brandt!" I might call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel, Magdalen, Mary--no, not Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but I owed some respect to the memory of it. If the "Mary" of my early days were still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to think even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of her at all? Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of tracing her in her letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace a woman who had gone I knew not whither, and who herself informed me that she meant to pass under an assumed name. Had I lost all pride, all self-respect? In the flower of my age, with a handsome fortune, with the world before me, full of interesting female faces and charming female figures, what course did it become me to take? To go back to my country-house, and mope over the loss of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to send for a courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at that moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my imagination. I first astonished the people at the hotel by ordering all further inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt to be stopped; and then I opened my writing desk and wrote to tell my mother frankly and fully of my new plans.