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Here I howl and tear my hair and rail at fortune because I lose something that I never had; she was never mine this girl of millions I had no right to her. But the sufferings of that poor child-wife are real, deep, heartrending; and there are thousands of others like her in this world. Get up, sluggard, get up! Go out and comfort them; go out into the world and mend broken hearts.
O, my child-wife, there is a figure in the moving crowd before my memory, quiet and still, saying in its innocent love and childish beauty, Stop to think of me turn to look upon the Little Blossom, as it flutters to the ground! I do. All else grows dim, and fades away. I am again with Dora, in our cottage. I do not know how long she has been ill.
The next time I sat down to write, and regularly afterwards, she sat in her old place, with a spare bundle of pens at her side. Her triumph in this connexion with my work, and her delight when I wanted a new pen which I very often feigned to do suggested to me a new way of pleasing my child-wife. I occasionally made a pretence of wanting a page or two of manuscript copied.
Even when she was quite a child, she was the Agnes whom we know, said I. 'Will you call me a name I want you to call me? inquired Dora, without moving. 'What is it? I asked with a smile. 'It's a stupid name, she said, shaking her curls for a moment. 'Child-wife. I laughingly asked my child-wife what her fancy was in desiring to be so called.
How he carried off his child-wife when she was only twelve, how he was imprisoned and poisoned, and at last left to starve in a dungeon, and would stand at his window crying, 'Bread, bread; for the love of God! yet no one dared to give him any, till a poor peasant woman went in the night and gave him half her black loaf.
To provide for his child-wife he obtained an office in the railway administration, but only temporarily, for already he had made up his mind to seek fortune and reputation in some foreign country. He pushed his solicitations with so much energy that, in the first year of his wedded life, he secured an appointment under the Turkish Government.
Forget all about labor and mill owner and color of pigments! You know now why the Oriental question is more than skin-deep. Go a little deeper in this child-wife thing! Don't balk at the horror of it! The Pacific Coast wants you to know a few medical facts.
Do I know, now, that my child-wife will soon leave me? They have told me so; they have told me nothing new to my thoughts but I am far from sure that I have taken that truth to heart. I cannot master it. I have withdrawn by myself, many times today, to weep. I have remembered Who wept for a parting between the living and the dead. I have bethought me of all that gracious and compassionate history.
When the grandmother departed, and the child-wife secretly made her way to New York, seeking service that would secure her bread, and still hopeful of her husband's return, Cuthbert grasped his father's arm and hissed in his ear: "You deceived me! You told me she went with that villain to California to hide her disgrace!"
And O, Agnes, even out of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee, to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its bloom! 'I am so blest, Trotwood my heart is so overcharged but there is one thing I must say. 'Dearest, what?
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