Wreck and Ruin; Or, Modern Society

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: CHAPTER III. Ten years after the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn had elected Arthur Cumberland to be a member of their body and of the bar, that gentleman wooed and won the widow of Sir Charles Mackintosh, who had the felicity of being childless, and, moreover, possessed of prodigious wealth, in other words, of six thousand a year, derivable from the three per cents., and an estate in Dorsetshire, valued at ninety thousand pounds. This, of course, was a splendid move, and success in the worldlygame of the ambitious barrister. Twelve months antecedent to this alliance, he had obtained the victory over an electioneering candidate for the borough of Clayfield, in Herefordshire, and now sate as its member in the House at Westminster. He was already a Q. C., and enjoyed a highly lucrative practice. Shortly after his marriage, he took a mansion in Berkeley Square; and his wife's family and connexions being extensive and influential, he began to look forward to office, not that the latter would be more remunerative than his private practice, but for the sake of rank. One success with Arthur Cumberland only fanned his desire to realize another; and the passion of ambition, ?the love of earthly glory and celebrity, ?far outvied that of love for his wife. He was not domestic; so that even the attractions of home, and of a being who sympathized with him (for itis not necessary in this base, mercenary age, that people should love each other in order to be happy in the married state), failed to absorb him in the least from the prosecution of those workings after fame and money which had so ardently and enthusiastically impelled him on during his years of bachelorhood. His wife was his elder by eight years; but in comparison with himself he thought her young, so old did he feel in the know.