Love stories; Unmarried mothers -- Fiction; Women household employees -- Fiction
It was curious that Kane held the well-founded idea that in time Jennie
would yield to him physically, as she had already done spiritually.
Just why he could not say. Something about her—a warm womanhood, a
guileless expression of countenance—intimated a sympathy toward sex
relationship which had nothing to do with hard, brutal immorality. She
was the kind of a woman who was made for a man—one man. All her
attitude toward sex was bound up with love, tenderness, service. When
the one man arrived she would love him and she would go to him. That
was Jennie as Lester understood her. He felt it. She would yield to him
because he was the one man.
On Jennie’s part there was a great sense of complication and of
possible disaster. If he followed her of course he would learn all. She
had not told him about Brander, because she was still under the vague
illusion that, in the end, she might escape. When she left him she knew
that he would come back. She knew, in spite of herself that she wanted
him to do so. Yet she felt that she must not yield, she must go on
leading her straitened, humdrum life. This was her punishment for
having made a mistake. She had made her bed, and she must lie on it.
The Kane family mansion at Cincinnati to which Lester returned after
leaving Jennie was an imposing establishment, which contrasted
strangely with the Gerhardt home. It was a great, rambling, two-story
affair, done after the manner of the French chateaux, but in red brick
and brownstone. It was set down, among flowers and trees, in an almost
park-like inclosure, and its very stones spoke of a splendid dignity
and of a refined luxury. Old Archibald Kane, the father, had amassed a
tremendous fortune, not by grabbing and brow-beating and unfair
methods, but by seeing a big need and filling it. Early in life he had
realized that America was a growing country. There was going to be a
big demand for vehicles—wagons, carriages, drays—and he knew that some
one would have to supply them. Having founded a small wagon industry,
he had built it up into a great business; he made good wagons, and he
sold them at a good profit. It was his theory that most men were
honest; he believed that at bottom they wanted honest things, and if
you gave them these they would buy of you, and come back and buy again
and again, until you were an influential and rich man. He believed in
the measure “heaped full and running over.” All through his life and
now in his old age he enjoyed the respect and approval of every one who
knew him. “Archibald Kane,” you would hear his competitors say, “Ah,
there is a fine man. Shrewd, but honest. He’s a big man.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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