"
If he knew of her escapade, that would at least shake him out of his
soft and well-lined rut. Indeed, Io was frank enough with herself to
admit that a perverse desire to explode a bomb under her imperturbable
and too-assured suitor had been an element in her projected elopement.
Never would that bomb explode. It would not even fizzle enough to alarm
Eyre or her family. For not a soul knew of the frustrated scheme, except
Holmesley and the reliable friend in Paradiso whom she was to visit; not
her father, Sims Welland, traveling in Europe on business, nor her aunt,
Mrs. Thatcher Forbes, in whose charge she had been left. Ostensibly she
had been going to visit the Westerleys, that was all: Mrs. Forbes's
misgivings as to a twenty-year-old girl crossing the continent alone had
been unavailing against Io's calm willfulness.
Well, she would go back and marry Del Eyre, and be comfortable ever
after. After all, liking and comprehension were a sounder foundation for
matrimony than the perishable glamour of an attraction like Holmesley's.
Any sensible person would know that. She wished that she had some older
and more experienced woman to talk it out with. Miss Van Arsdale, if
only she knew her a little better....
Camilla Van Arsdale, even on so casual an acquaintance, would have told
Io, reckoning with the slumbering fire in her eyes, and the sensitive
and passionate turn of the lips, but still more with the subtle and
significant emanation of a femininity as yet unawakened to itself, that
for her to marry on the pallid expectancies of mere liking would be to
invite disaster and challenge ruin.
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