His Other Wife: A Novel — page 246: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

238 “IN DURANCE VILE.” condition had not been mentioned in the indictment upon which he was arrested. Leda had troubled herself too little about winning the regard of the community in which she had been born, and where her early childhood had passed, to expect much sympathy from it in her time of need. All of her youth had been spent abroad, and, except occasional and brief visits to their beautiful home in Florida, there were no local associations with her to make her calamity espoused as one of social interest. While the eminent legal talent and financial success of Mr. Croft had made him a personage of much conse- quence among the citizens of , his natural selfishness and coldness estranged from him the confidence of his associates and equals (superiors he did not acknowledge), and attracted the dislike of the lower classes. But talent and success atone for a multitude of grave defects, and, having made a reputation and accumulated a fortune, Mathew Croft seemed sublimely indifferent to the kindly sentiments of his race. Perhaps a reason for his intense and invariable reserve, which often amounted to moroseness, might be found in the fact of his having some dark passages in his history, the concealment of which an intimacy with others might have imperiled. | There seemed to be less of this austere self-repression in his relations with his young partner, whose career he had materially helped to form, than with any other. person, Eomicbooks.co