But "Zordie's wife" took her _sobriquet_ very
seriously,--so much so, indeed, that by-and-by "Zordie" began to take it
rather seriously himself--and to wonder whether, after all, marriages,
unequal in point of age, might not occasionally turn out well. He
condemned himself severely for the romanticism of thinking such
thoughts, even while he indulged in them, and called himself "an old
fool," though he was in the actual prime of manhood, and an exceedingly
handsome fellow withal.
But when the younger Thelma came back at the age of sixteen from her
convent school at Arles,--the same school where her mother had been
before her,--she looked so like her mother, so very like, that his heart
began to ache with the old, wistful, passionate longing he fancied he
had stilled for ever. He struggled against this feeling for a while,
till at last it became too strong for him,--and then, though he told
himself it was absurd,--that a man past forty had no right to expect to
win a girl's first love, he grew so reckless that he determined to risk
his fate with her.
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