"
Very often after this Mr. Fairfax fell a-musing upon those apocryphal men
who might be subjugated by the charms of Miss Lovel.
When did he awaken to the fatal truth that those charms were exercising a
most potent influence upon his own mind? When did he open his eyes for the
first time to behold his danger?
Not yet. He was really attached to Geraldine Challoner. Her society had
been a kind of habit with him for several years of his life. She had been
more admired than any woman he knew, and it was, in some sort, a triumph to
have won her. That he never would have won her but for his brother's death
he knew very well, and accepted the fact as a matter of course; a mere
necessity of the world in which they lived, not as evidence of a mercenary
spirit in the lady. He knew that no woman could better discharge the duties
of an elevated station, or win him more social renown. To marry Geraldine
Challoner was to secure for his house the stamp of fashion, for every
detail of his domestic life a warrant of good taste. She had a kind of
power over him too, an influence begun long ago, which had never yet been
oppressive to him. And he took these things for love. He had been in love
with other women during his long alliance with Lady Geraldine, and had
shown more ardour in the pursuit of other flames than he had ever evinced
in his courtship of her; but these more passionate attachments had come,
for the most part, to a sorry end; and now he told himself that Geraldine
suited him better than any other woman in the world.
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