."

Her reply to all this was not entirely disheartening. "To make money is
not the most important thing in the world," she said, and then told me
of her own childhood in Illinois, of the rigid economies which had
always been necessary in the Taft home. "My father's salary as a
professor of geology was small, and with six people to feed and clothe,
and four children to be educated, my poor little mother had a very busy
and anxious time of it. I know by personal experience what it is to lack
money for food and clothes. The length of my stay in Paris was dependent
on rigid daily economy. I hadn't an extra franc to spare."

This confession of her own lifelong poverty should have turned me aside
from my fell purpose, but it did not--it merely encouraged me to go on.
In place of saying, "My dear girl, as compensation for all those years
of care and humiliating poverty you deserve a spacious home, with
servants and a carriage. Realizing that I can offer you only continued
poverty and added anxiety, I here and now relinquish my design. I
withdraw in favor of a better and richer man"--instead of uttering these
noble words, what did I do? I did the exact opposite! I proceeded to
press my selfish, remorseless, unwarranted demand!

It is customary for elderly men to refer either flippantly or with
gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the
tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of
purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married
life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in
writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years
have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our
eyes and thinned our blood, but I shall permit neither of these unworthy
moods to color my report of this day's emotion. I shall not deny the
alternating moments of hope and doubt, of bitterness and content, which
made that afternoon both sweet and sad.

The thing I was about to do was tragically destructive--I knew that. To
put out a hand, to arrest this happy and tranquil girl, saying, "Come,
be my wife. Come, suffer with me, starve with me," was a deed whose
consequences scared me while they allured me. I felt the essential
injustice of such a marriage, and I foresaw some of its accompanying
perplexities, but I did not turn aside as I should have done. With no
dependable source of income, with an invalid mother to care