that he must go back with intentions more explicit than
before, and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he
had meant by going there. His liking for Christine had certainly not
increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in
leash had not yet palled upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was
a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the man who had no control
over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one
else. The fact cannot other wise be put in terms, and the attraction
which Christine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapes from all
terms, as anything purely and merely passional must. He had seen from
the first that she was a cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things,
he felt that she would be a shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her
beauty, and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with
her temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions, and even broken
to pieces. Then the consciousness of her money entered. It was evident
that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to
him of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his
son-in-law. Beaton did not put it to himself in those words; and in fact
his cogitations were not in words at all. It was the play of cognitions,
of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very
clumsily interpreted in language. But when he got to this point in them,
Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed
of a part of Dryfoos's riches in placing his father and mother, and his
brothers and sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever. He had no
shame, no scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever
since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given
him the money to go and study abroad. Beaton had always considered the
money a loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never
dreamt of repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for
the notion of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling
very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from
him, though he never repaid his father, either. In this reverie he saw
himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of
admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity
with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his
unselfis