Victims, by Theo Gift (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 62 CHAPTER III. BENOITE THE BLANCHISSEUSE. After finishing his letter to Leah, Marst- land went out to post it himself. Writing it had distracted his mind for the time being from the immediate trouble of what to do about Vera, and had done so the more pleasantly because, with that happy confidence in the honesty and goodwill of others which is inherent in some people, he never for a moment doubted that Leah's heartiest sympathy and interest would go with every word he wrote. He was not a vain man. It had never occurred to him for an instant that the Jewish girl's feeling for him, any more than his for her, had a tenderer elementthan friendship in it. As he had told Vera that evening on the water, their different creeds seemed a sufficient bar against all ideas of love or marriage between them; but then on the other hand that very fact made their friendship all the stronger and sweeter by taking any elements of foolish flirtation from it, and enabling them to show frankly their appreciation of each other's character, and preference for each other's society, without risk of comment or misunderstanding. Whether he was right, and whether any guarantees of friendship are strong enough to do away with such risk in a cynical and un-utopian age is another question; as also whether if Leah had shown equal appreciation of anyone else, Marstland might not have been reminded that ' friendship is only love in mufti,' by the pangs of un- platonic jealousy. The plain facts were that Leah never had given him a loophole for such jealousy while he himself waseminently Utopian in all his ideas, and never so easily moved to wrath as by the sneering and cynical tone so common in the present day. ' By the time they have given up believing in God and Heaven they will already have ceased to ...