The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4892]
"I want you," he had said, huskily.
And even afterward, when the thing was done, and she had said she would marry him, she had to ask him if he loved her.
"I - of course I do," he had said. And had drawn her back into his arms.
He wanted to marry her at once. It was the strongest urge of his life, and put into his pleading an almost pathetic earnestness. But she was firm enough now.
"I don't think your family will be crazy about this, you know."
"What do we care for the family? They're not marrying you, are they?"
"They will have to help to support me, won't they?"
And he had felt a trifle chilled.
It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try to live on his salary.
So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs. Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute evidence.
Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.
Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.
"What's he hanging around here for?" he demanded when Rodney, having bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. "If he could see that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing."
"You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?" Marion had said. "He's a very old friend and a very dear one."
"Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?"
He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.
"I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!"
"About me?"
"About me."
"Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never go anywhere but here. I - I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild."
"They've always come here, and as long as our engagement isn't known, I can't very well stop them."
"Then let me go to father."
"He'll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is going to raise a merry little hell about us. He's the sort who wants to choose his son's wife for him. He'd like to play Providence." She watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. "I rather think he has somebody in mind for you now."
"I don't believe it."
"Of course you don't. But he has."
"Who?"
"Delight. She's exactly the sort he thinks you'll need. He still thinks you are a little boy, Graham, so he picks out a nice little girl for you. Such a nice little girl."
The amused contempt in her voice made him angry - for Delight rather than himself. He was extremely grown-up and dignified the rest of the afternoon; he stood very tall and straight, and spoke in his deepest voice.
It became rather an obsession in him to prove his manhood, and added to that was the effect of Marion's constant, insidious appeal to the surging blood of his youth. And, day after day, he was shut in his office with Anna Klein.
He thought he was madly in love with Marion. He knew that he was not at all in love with Anna