Weaker than a Woman — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

118 | WEAKER THAN A WOMAN. give me; there would not be enough to fill my life. I felt that when I stood in it. I asked myself how I should: live through the long years there. J should be miserable, and you would be miserable, too.” He looked at her in amazement. “Would not love content you?” he asked. The golden head drooped before him. She was. ashamed of the words she had to speak. ‘No, it would not content me,” she replied. ‘ You deem me better, wiser, and nobler than I am. There are hun- © dreds of good and noble women in the world who ask only for love and are content with it. Seek one of those, Felix —they are worthier than I.” ‘Hush !” he cried again. “Do not say such words; many a man has taken the life of the woman he loved for less than that.” She shrank back from him with a pale, scared face; he smiled one of the saddest and bitterest smiles she had .ever seen on a human face. ‘Have no fear, Violet; I spoke without reflection. You cannot think I meant to threaten you; you, every hair of whose head is dearer to me than my own life. Love would not content you, Violet?” ‘No. I may as well tell you the truth. I was ignorant of many things when I promised to marry you. I did not know what riches meant, what luxury or magnificence was, what luxury or pleasure comprised.” “And you know now ?” he said when she paused. “Yes, I know now, and I cannot do without them. I would rather have had love with them; as I cannot have both, I choose them. You cannot call it a great sin, Felix, to change my mind when I did not know what my mind was.”’ “Violet,” he said, gravely, “do you know what even the world says of a woman who deliberately jilts her lover?” ‘No,’ she replied. “Tt says some hard things. It says that the woman who could be false to her plighted lover, would be false to her husband and to Heaven; it says that such a woman brands herself ‘liar’ before the whole world, that she loses the claim to rank with women of honor. That is what the world says. Do you know what a higher power than the world Says ?”’ | “No,” she answered him again. “That lying lips are an abomination. Whose lips lie 50 cruelly, so falsely, as the lips of the woman who breaks . ~= Eomicbooks.com | = ‘ oi CL BPRS ye ale ban ; i. » Ym . Se *) wre vy