Excerpt
CHAPTER I
HERO VERSUS GENTLEMAN
Miss Fanny Glen's especial detestation was an assumption of authority on the part of the other sex. If there was a being on earth to whom she would not submit, it was to a masterful man; such a man as, if appearances were a criterion, Rhett Sempland at that moment assumed to be.
The contrast between the two was amusing, or would have been had not the atmosphere been so surcharged with passionate feeling, for Rhett Sempland was six feet high if he was an inch, while Fanny Glen by a Procrustean extension of herself could just manage to cover the five-foot mark; yet such was the spirit permeating the smaller figure that there seemed to be no great disparity, from the standpoint of combatants, between them after all.
Rhett Sempland was deeply in love with Miss Fanny Glen. His full consciousness of that fact shaded his attempted mastery by ever so little.
He was sure of the state of his affections and by that knowledge the weaker, for Fanny Glen was not at all sure that she was in love with Rhett Sempland. That is to say, she had not yet realized it; perhaps better, she had not yet admitted the existence of a reciprocal passion in her own breast to that she had long since learned had sprung up in his. By just that lack of admission she was stronger than he for the moment.
When she discovered the undoubted fact that she did love Rhett Sempland her views on the mastery of man would probably alter—at least for a time! Love, in its freshness, would make her a willing slave; for how long, events only could determine. For some women a lifetime, for others but an hour, can elapse before the chains turn from adornments to shackles.
The anger that Miss Fanny Glen felt at this particular moment gave her a temporary reassurance as to some questions which had agitated her—how much she cared, after all, for Lieutenant Rhett Sempland, and did she like him better than Major Harry Lacy? Both questions were instantly decided in the negative—for the time being. She hated Rhett Sempland; per contra, at that moment, she loved Harry Lacy. For Harry Lacy was he about whom the difference began. Rhett Sempland, confident of his own affection and hopeful as to hers, had attempted, with masculine futility and obtuseness, to prohibit the further attentions of Harry Lacy.
Just as good blood, au fond, ran in Harry Lacy's veins as in Rhett Sempland's, but Lacy, following in the footsteps of his ancestors, had mixed his with the water that is not water because it is fire.
He "crooked the pregnant hinges" of the elbow without cessation, many a time and oft, and all the vices—as they usually do—followed en train. One of the oldest names in the Carolinas had been dragged in the dust by this latest and most degenerate scion thereof. Nay, in that dust Lacy had wallowed—shameless, persistent, beast-like.
To Lacy, therefore, the Civil War came as a godsend, as it had to many another man in like circumstances, for it afforded another and more congenial outlet for the wild passion beating out from his heart....