The Dugdale Millions — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

12 THE DUGDALE MILLIONS. a day only had parted them, and quarreled over their politics and religion with a hearty liking for each other. Mrs, Stanton was a second wife, some twenty-five years younger than her husband. She was a good, kindly woman—hospitable and charitable, but pos- sessed of the demon jealousy. Certainly the life of her husband did not justify the doubts she enter- tained, but as she was a woman thoroughly ingrained with superstition, devoutly believing in the revelation of the unknown by means of signs and dreams, she pursued him with hersuspicions. As she was nightly dreaming that he was making tender love to some woman she had never known or heard of, she was daily vexing herself with jealousy of the unknown, to his infinite perplexity and irritation. Moreover she had frequent recourse to the cards, as revealing his relations to the fair sex, and seasoned his dinners with veiled allusions to a diamond woman, or a spade woman, to his com- plete mystification and the intense amusement of the other member of his household, a young girl. This young girl was Mr. Stanton’s niece, an orphan he cared for, the child of his younger sister—Wallis Gladwin—a frolicsome sprite with a rare fund of humor, whose mischievousness brightened, as well as perplexed, the somber old house. She was the bosom friend of Bessie Hetlow though three years her junior, and in all things, complexion, size, spirits, mind, and humor, the direct opposite of her friend. Beauty, though widely different, they possessed in common. They loved each other as dearly as sisters never sep- arated could, and were devout believers in each other. The house of one was almost the house of the other. In this friendship Mr. Hetlow and Mr. Stanton and his wife acquiesced, notwithstanding the former stood somewhat in dread of the quick tongue and indepen- dent personality of Wallis, and the headlong direct- ness with which she plunged in wd arrived at the cComicloo® S C@ 3