The Craze of Christina — page 137: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Craze of Christina. 133 to say to him! But if he could only induce her to consent to it, why should she not be engaged to him for three years and marry him as soon as ever the time was up? There was nothing in his uncle’s will to prevent a three years’ en- gagement, but of course she would have to love him very much indeed to consent to wait for him all that time, and Mark was afraid that Miss Pratt could not possibly care about him so much 4s all that. He might win her perhaps by degrees, but he ~ was in such a fever of consuming love and de- sire that he felt himself to be totally incapable of slow and gradual methods. He wanted her to accept him now, at once—in a week’s time at least. And then perhaps he should be con- tent, for if she were but engaged to him, he _ thought he might be able to support the three years of probation with a very tolerable amount of patience. He had never been engaged to be married himself, nor had he ever had any in- timate acquaintance with the manners and cus- toms of engaged couples; nevertheless he was pretty sure that an engaged man enjoys certain delightful privileges with regard to the lady of his affections from which other men are rigorously debarred. He should, for instance, have the right, the absolute right, to seek her Comichooks.co