fect. He could
go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as before, and it was clear that he
was very much desired to come back. But if he went back it was also clear
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 D