"
Molly had fled suddenly into remoteness--not Reuben's death, but Mr.
Jonathan's "provision," had swept her away from him. Like other
mortals in other crises of experience, she was aware of a helpless,
a rebellious, realization of the power, not of fate, but of money. No
other accident of fortune could have detached her so completely from the
surroundings in which he had known her. Though he told himself that
to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid
brutality of soul, he revolted the next instant from the idea that his
love should demand so great a sacrifice. Like the majority of men who
have risen to comparative comfort out of bitter poverty, he had at the
same time a profound contempt and an inordinate respect for the tangible
fact of money--a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect
for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the
symbol. Sarah's hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery
of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in his
character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to
think lightly of renouncing--or of inviting another to renounce--an
income of ten thousand dollars a year.
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