Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/79

 hand, he knew the world too well to want a woman beside him who knew it equally well.

On the whole, the project of M. de St. Louis repelled as much as it attracted him. Yet his wisdom told him that it was the marriage beyond all others which would best fulfil his destiny in the way which from his earliest years he had been accustomed to regard as inevitable; and, moreover, there was something about her which charmed his senses, though his judgment feared and in some things his taste disapproved her.

Besides, to make so self-engrossed a woman love;—he smiled as he sat and smoked in the solitude of his great dim vaulted room, and then he sighed impatiently.

After all, it was not a beau role to woo a woman for the sheer sake of her fortune; and he was too true a gentleman not to know it. And what would money do for him if it were hers and not his?—it would only humiliate him,—he felt no taste for the position of a prince consort,—it would pass to his children certainly