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The Valley of the Moon by Jack London
page 183 of 681 (26%)
cheapen love. Never, in the weeks of their married life, had
Billy found her dowdy, or harshly irritable, or lethargic. And
she had deliberately permeated her house with her personal
atmosphere of coolness, and freshness, and equableness. Nor had
she been ignorant of such assets as surprise and charm. Her
imagination had not been asleep, and she had been born with
wisdom. In Billy she had won a prize, and she knew it. She
appreciated his lover's ardor and was proud. His open-handed
liberality, his desire for everything of the best, his own
personal cleanliness and care of himself she recognized as far
beyond the average. He was never coarse. He met delicacy with
delicacy, though it was obvious to her that the initiative in all
such matters lay with her and must lie with her always. He was
largely unconscious of what he did and why. But she knew in all
full clarity of judgment. And he was such a prize among men.

Despite her clear sight of her problem of keeping Billy a lover,
and despite the considerable knowledge and experience arrayed
before her mental vision, Mercedes Higgins had spread before her
a vastly wider panorama. The old woman had verified her own
conclusions, given her new ideas, clinched old ones, and even
savagely emphasized the tragic importance of the whole problem.
Much Saxon remembered of that mad preachment, much she guessed
and felt, and much had been beyond her experience and
understanding. But the metaphors of the veils and the flowers,
and the rules of giving to abandonment with always more to
abandon, she grasped thoroughly, and she was enabled to formulate
a bigger and stronger love-philosophy. In the light of the
revelation she re-examined the married lives of all she had ever
known, and, with sharp definiteness as never before, she saw
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