Shortly after this, he encountered Margaret Grahame. As she was marriageable, and had ten thousand pounds by way of dowry, he proposed for her hand. How could she refuse ten thousand a year? The possibility of liking Claverhouse Grahame never entered her imagination. She took him as part of the fortune--rather because she could not have the fortune without him, and because the married state was not altogether complete without a husband.
Of love, in its purity and holiness, she had no conception. She considered her father and mother as grand and dignified persons, entitled to filial respect and deference from her. She was passionately fond of state, and pomp, and display, of jewels, of dress, of genealogy--whatever pertained to an elevated position; but an emotion purely disinterested, one equal to a self-sacrifice, she never possessed. She gave her hand to Grahame, because the act brought her ten thousand a year. Her heart was only so far involved in the transaction that it vibrated with pleasure at the prospect of the situation in which such an income would place her.
It was a natural consequence of Grahame’s probation, and his wife’s immeasurable pride--a pride which, like his, had been confined by the economical style of living adopted by her parents, to enable them to give such a wedding portion with her as he had received--that his imagination should convert the capabilities of ten thousand a year into those of five times the amount, and that, by the same process of mental exaggeration, his forty thousand pounds, should appear inexhaustible.
He proceeded to live as though his income possessed an elasticity which enabled it to stretch to any length, and was startled, at the end of some few years, to find that his forty thousand pounds had not only evaporated, but that his liabilities more than exceeded three years’ income. He was too proud to make his wife acquainted with this unpleasant state of his affairs, because it would necessitate suggestions of retrenchment. Now she had formed so large an estimate of her dowry, that he was quite aware she would taunt him with having unjustifiably made away with it, although she had herself spent every shilling of it, and a large sum in addition, in the indulgence of her overweening pride.