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Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 1876-1958

"Dangerous Days"


It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family
unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of
the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the
essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry
Graham and to try to live on his salary.
So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs.
Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on
his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought
the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was
absolute evidence.
Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure
a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him
uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she
reduced love to its cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played
on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.
Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of
a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over
Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches
spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.


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