His Other Wife: A Novel — page 250: what you’re looking at

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

24:2 6&6 IN DURANCE VILE.” as with a lurid glare that made all things glow before her with magical distinctness. In her simple intuitiveness, she had managed to con- _ found and baffle the skill, the experience, the cunning, and the malice of this powerful intelligence. And Mathew Croft now sat lost in a mazy tissue of vague and vain conjectures as to how much power this woman had to harm him. The most appalling of all the results which might accrue out of the whole affair was the disgrace and the hideousness of standing confessed before the world he had duped for so long a time as a fraud and a villain of the deepest dye. The one acutely sensitive spot in this man’s hard nature was his craving after popular applause. It was this that had stimulated his vanity when he adopted in his youth and extreme poverty the career of itinerant preacher. When he held a congregation of humble devotees pal- pitating in the skill of his torrid elocution, he forgot the hardships and poverty of his adopted calling, and enjoyed moments of exquisite delight. The instant that chance favored him with the opportu- nity to escape to higher and wider fields through the acquisition of Rachel's fortune, he seized it eagerly, and used it, as we have seen, unscrupulously. } At no time had he ever been addicted to the mere physical pleasures—his passions were more of the mind than the body. For women he never cared, and he soon Eomicbooks: co im