She
believed sincerely that her girlhood love for Phil was dead. This man,
even as Patches the cowboy, with a questionable shadow on his life, had
compelled her respect and confidence, while in his evident education and
social culture he had won her deepest admiration. She felt that he was
all that Phil was, and more. There was in her feeling toward him, as he
offered himself to her now, no hint of that instinctive repulsion and
abhorrence with which she had received Professor Parkhill's declaration
of spiritual affinity. Her recent experience with the Master of
Aesthetics had so outraged her womanly instincts that the inevitable
reaction from her perplexed and troubled mind led her to feel more
deeply, and to be drawn more strongly, toward this man with whom any
woman might be proud to mate. At the same time, the attractions of the
life which she knew he could give her, and for which she longed so
passionately, with the relief of the thought that her parents would not
need to sacrifice themselves for her, were potent factors in the power
of Lawrence Knight's appeal.
"It would be wonderful," she said musingly. "I have dreamed and dreamed
about such things.
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