Of course, he saw clearly enough that there
was an object in all this--he saw that Ida, by making obvious her
dislike, wished to disgust him with his bargain, and escape from an
alliance of which the prospect was hateful to her. But he had no
intention of being so easily discouraged. In the first place his
passion for the woman was as a devouring flame, eating ever at his
heart. In that at any rate he was sincere; he did love her so far as
his nature was capable of love, or at any rate he had the keenest
desire to make her his wife. A delicate-minded man would probably have
shrunken from forcing himself upon a woman under parallel
circumstances; but Edward Cossey did not happen to fall into that
category. As a matter of fact such men are not as common as they might
be.
Another thing which he took into account was that Ida would probably
get over her dislike. He was a close observer of women, in a cynical
and half contemptuous way, and he remarked, or thought that he
remarked, a curious tendency among them to submit with comparative
complacency to the inevitable whenever it happened to coincide with
their material advantage. Women, he argued, have not, as a class,
outgrown the traditions of their primitive condition when their
partners for life were chosen for them by lot or the chance of battle.
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