The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, i
o
ornament in a deliberate and leisurely manner. He was the last
man to plague himself by any subtle questionings as to the senti¬
ments of the lady so honoured, or to be harassed by doubts of her
fidelity. He had no objection to seeing his wife surrounded by
youthful admirers. Was she not meant to be admired, as much as
his pictures and statues ? He found no fault with the chosen band
of " nice boys " who attended her afternoon at home, or crowded
the back of her box when the curtain was down at opera-house or
theatre ; and if Gerard Hillersdon were more constant than all the
others in his attendance, the fact never presented itself in any
unpleasant light to Mr, Champion. Had he given himself the
trouble to think about his wife's relations with her cavaliere se7-ve7iie
he would most assuredly have told himself that she was much too
well placed to overstep the limits of prudence, and that no woman
in her right senses would abandon a palace in Surrey and a model
house in Hertford Street for the caravanseries that lodge the
divorcee. He would have remembered also with satisfaction that
his wife's settlement, liberal as it was, would be made null and void
by a divorce.
And thus for three years of his life—perhaps the best and
brightest years in a man's life, from twenty-five to twenty-eight—
Gerard Hillersdon had given up all his thoughts, aspirations, and
dreams to the most hopeless of all love aftairs, an attachment to an
irreproachable matron, a woman who had accepted her lot as an
unloving wife and who meant to do her duty, in her own cold and
measured way, to an unloved husband; yet who clung to the
memoiy of a girlish love and fostered the passion of her lover,
caring, or at least seeming to care, nothing for his peace, and never
estimating the wrong she was doing him.
To this passion everything in the young man's life had been
sacrificed. He had begun his career on fire with ambition, believing
in his capacity to succeed in more than one profession; and in the
first flush of his manhood he had done some really good work in
imaginative literature, had written a novel which took the town,
and had made his brief success as an original writer, romantic, light
of touch, unconventional; but he had been drifted into idleness by
a woman who treated him as some queen or princess in the days
of chivalrj' might have treated her page. She spoilt his career,
]ust when a lasting success was within his reach, needing only
earnestness and industry on his part. She had wasted the golden
days of his youth, and had given him in exchange only smiles and
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