her to marry him.

Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
had been no handsomer man in all America. Even yet he had a remarkable
face: long, delicate, with dark-brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with gray--gray, though he
was but twenty-nine years of age.

When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with her
and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance. He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on the
Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time. Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had gifts
of a wonderful kind. He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine and
Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was a
speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for business.
He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's great
business. It was because he had the real business gift, not because he had
a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken him into his
concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to temptation.
Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed him from his
mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace, Anacreon, and
philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the feeble-minded.
He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and would do by-and-by
in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when he was ready to slip
out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond calculation.

In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken to
drink at critical moments in their operations. At first, high words had
been spoken, then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures, and
both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way. Then,
at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim had
flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight, or a
month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after his
darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man