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A Marriage
by
His voice was half decided, wholly interrogative, and West smiled. There had been a moment in all their conversations of the past six weeks, when some such remark from Catterson was sure to fall. Experience enabled West to anticipate its arrival, and he smiled to find his anticipation so accurately fulfilled.
“My dear chap, I see you’re going to do it,” he answered, “so it’s useless for me to protest any more. But I’ll just remind you of an old dictum, which, maybe, you’ll respect, because it’s in French: ‘Ne faites jamais de votre maitresse, votre femme. ‘ “
West spoke lightly, uttering the quotation just because it happened to flash through his mind; but all the same, it was a fixed idea of his, that if you married a girl of “that sort,” she was sure to discover, sooner or later, colossal vices; she was sure to kick over the traces, to take to drink, or to some other form of dissipation.
Catterson shrugged his shoulders, flushed, and frowned; then recovered his temper, and began again, stammeringly, tumultuously, his words tripping over one another in their haste. He always stammered a little in moments of emotion.
“But you d-don’t know Nettie. She’s not at all–s-she’s quite different from what you think. Until she had the misfortune to meet with me, she was as good a girl as you could find.”
“No, I don’t know her, I admit,” observed West, and smoked in silence.
“I have been thinking,” Catterson said presently, “that I should like you to come down to see her. I should like you to make her acquaintance, because then I am sure you would agree I am right. I do want to have your support and approval, you know.”
West smiled again. It amused him to note the anxiety Catterson exhibited for his approval and support, yet he knew all the time that the young man was bent on marrying Nettie Hooper in spite of anything he could say.
But he understood the springs of the apparent contradiction. He understood Catterson fairly well, without being fond of him. They had been schoolmates. Chance lately, rather than choice on West’s side, had again thrown them together; now the luncheon hour saw them in almost daily companionship. And, correcting his impressions of the impulsive, sensitive, volatile little boy by these more recent ones, he read Catterson’s as a weak, amiable, and affectionate nature; he saw him always anxious to stand well with his associates, to be liked and looked up to by his little world. To do as others do, was his ruling passion; what Brown, Jones, and Robinson might say of him, his first consideration. It was because at one time Robinson, Jones, and Brown had been represented for him by a circle of gay young Frenchmen that he had thought it incumbent up on him, when opportunity offered, to tread in their footsteps. It was because he found his path set now within the respectable circles of British middle-class society, that his anomalous position was becoming a burden; that the double personality of married man and father in his riverside lodgings, of eligible bachelor in the drawing-rooms of Bayswater and Maida Vale, grew daily more intolerable to sustain. He could think of no easier way out of the dilemma than to make Nettie his wife and to allow the news gradually to leak out that he had been married for the last two years.
Some of his arguments in favour of the marriage–and he required many arguments to outweigh his consciousness of the mésalliance–were, that for all practical purposes, he was as good as married already. He could never give Nettie up; he must always provide for her and the child as long as he lived. And his present mode of life was full of inconveniences. He was living at Teddington under an assumed name, and it is not at all pleasant to live under an assumed name. At any moment one may be discovered, and an awkward situation may ensue.