He had great trouble to drive the figures away. It was only when he
thought fixedly of Catherine Trelane as she used to be that they
disappeared. She was a vision then to banish all else. He had a picture
of her somewhere among his papers. He had not seen it for years, but no
picture could do her justice: as rich as was her coloring, as beautiful
as were her eyes, her mouth, her _riante_ face, her slim, willowy,
girlish figure and fine carriage, it was not these that came to him when
he thought of her; it was rather the spirit of which these were but the
golden shell: it was the smile, the music, the sunshine, the radiance
which came to him and warmed his blood and set his pulses throbbing
across all those years. He would get the picture and look at it.
But memory swept him on.
He had got in the tide of success and the current had borne him away.
First it had been the necessity to succeed; then ambition; then
opportunity to do better and better always taking firmer hold of him and
bearing him further and further until the pressure of business, change
of ambition and, at last, of ideals swept him beyond sight of all he had
known or cared for.
He could almost see the process of the metamorphosis. Year after year he
had waited and worked and Catherine Trelane had waited; then had come a
time when he did not wish her to wait longer. His ideals had changed.
Success had come to mean but one thing for him: gold; he no longer
strove for honors but for riches. He abandoned the thought of glory and
of power, of which he had once dreamed. Now he wanted gold. Beauty would
fade, culture prove futile; but gold was king, and all he saw bowed
before it. Why marry a poor girl when another had wealth?
He found a girl as handsome as Catherine Trelane. It was not a chapter
in his history in which he took much pride. Just when he thought he had
succeeded, her father had interposed and she had yielded easily. She had
married a fool with ten times Livingstone's wealth. It was a blow to
Livingstone, but he had recovered, and after that he had a new incentive
in life; he would be richer than her father or her husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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