Like sleeping
cancers, the Austin vices had lain dormant in him during boyhood;
it had required the mutation from youth to manhood, and the
alterative effect of marriage, to rouse them; but, once awakened,
their ravages had been swift and destructive. Ed's marriage to
Alaire had been inevitable. They had been playmates, and their
parents had considered the union a consummation of their own
lifelong friendship. Upon her mother's death, Alaire had been sent
abroad, and there she remained while "Young Ed" attended an
Eastern college. For any child the experience would have been a
lonesome one, and through it the motherless Texas girl had grown
into an imaginative, sentimental person, living in a make-believe
world, peopled, for the most part, with the best-remembered
figures of romance and fiction. There were, of course, some few
flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these the finest and
the noblest had been "Young Ed" Austin.
When she came home to marry, Alaire was still very much of a
child, and she still considered Ed her knight. As for him, he was
captivated by this splendid, handsome girl, whom he remembered
only as a shy, red-headed little comrade.
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