Her reply to all this was not entirely disheartening. "To make money is not the most important thing in the world," she said, and then told me of her own childhood in Illinois, of the rigid economies which had always been necessary in the Taft home. "My father's salary as a professor of geology was small, and with six people to feed and clothe, and four children to be educated, my poor little mother had a very busy and anxious time of it. I know by personal experience what it is to lack money for food and clothes. The length of my stay in Paris was dependent on rigid daily economy. I hadn't an extra franc to spare."
This confession of her own lifelong poverty should have turned me aside from my fell purpose, but it did not--it merely encouraged me to go on. In place of saying, "My dear girl, as compensation for all those years of care and humiliating poverty you deserve a spacious home, with servants and a carriage. Realizing that I can offer you only continued poverty and added anxiety, I here and now relinquish my design. I withdraw in favor of a better and richer man"--instead of uttering these noble words, what did I do? I did the exact opposite! I proceeded to press my selfish, remorseless, unwarranted demand!
It is customary for elderly men to refer either flippantly or with gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our eyes and thinned our blood, but I shall permit neither of these unworthy moods to color my report of this day's emotion. I shall not deny the alternating moments of hope and doubt, of bitterness and content, which made that afternoon both sweet and sad.
The thing I was about to do was tragically destructive--I knew that. To put out a hand, to arrest this happy and tranquil girl, saying, "Come, be my wife. Come, suffer with me, starve with me," was a deed whose consequences scared me while they allured me. I felt the essential injustice of such a marriage, and I foresaw some of its accompanying perplexities, but I did not turn aside as I should have done. With no dependable source of income, with an invalid mother to care for, I asked this artist, so urban, so native to the studio, so closely knit to her joyous companions in the city, to go with me into exile, into a country town, to be the housekeeper of a commonplace cottage filled with aged people! "It is monstrous selfishness; it is wrong," I said, "but I want you."