He was convinced that she had been bullied, cowed, coerced, or whatever you like, into this atrocious marriage, and, of course, there could be no one to blame but her soulless mother. The girl ought to be saved. (These are Simmy's thoughts.) She was being sacrificed to the greed of an unnatural mother. Admitting, for the sake of argument, that she was no longer in love with Braden Thorpe, there still remained the positive conviction that she could not be in love with any one else, and certainly not with that treacherous old man in Washington Square. That, of course, was utterly impossible, so there was but the one alternative: she was being forced into a marriage that would bring the most money into the hands of the designing and, to him, clearly unnatural parent. He knew nothing of the ante-nuptial settlement, nor was he aware of the old man's quixotic design in coming between Braden and the girl he loved. To Simmy it was nothing short of brigandage, a sort of moral outlawry. Old Templeton Thorpe deserved a coat of tar and feathers, and there was no word for the punishment that ought to be meted out to Mrs. Tresslyn. He tried to think of what ought to be done to her, and, getting as far as boiling oil, gave up in despair, for even that was too much like compassion. Money! The whole beastly business was money! He thought of his own unestimated wealth. Nothing but money,—horrible, insensate, devastating money! He shuddered as he thought of what his money was likely to bring to him in the end: a loveless wife; avarice in place of respect; misery instead of joy; destruction! How was he ever to know whether a girl was marrying him for himself or for the right to lay hands upon the money his father had left to him when he died? How can any rich man know what he is getting into when he permits a girl to come into his home? To burglarise it with the sanction of State and Church, perhaps, and to escape with the connivance of both after she's got all she wants. That's where the poor man has an advantage over the unprotected rich: he is never confronted by a problem like this. He doesn't have to stop and wonder why the woman marries him. He knows it's love, or stupidity, or morality, but it is never duplicity.