'
The Duke as he went away thought very much of what Lady Cantrip
had said to him;--particularly of those last words. 'Till some one
else has made himself agreeable to her.' Was he to send his girl
into the world in order that she might find a lover? There was
something in the idea which was thoroughly distasteful to him. He
had not given his mind much to the matter, but had felt that a
woman should be sought for,--sought for and extracted, cunningly,
as it were, from some hiding-place, and not sent out into a market
to be exposed as for sale. In his own personal history there had
been a misfortune,--a misfortune, the sense of which he could
never, at any moment, have expressed to any ears, the memory of
which had been always buried deep in his own bosom,--but a
misfortune in that no such cunning extraction on his part had won
for him the woman to whose hands had been confided the strings of
his heart. His wife had undergone that process of extraction
before he had seen her, and his marriage with her had been a
matter of sagacious bargaining.
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