A dozen years of utmost and post-nuptial
possession of his wife had proved to him, so far as he was
concerned, that she was his one woman in the world, and that the
woman was unborn, much less unglimpsed, who could for a moment
compete with her in his heart, his soul, and his brain. Impossible
of existence was the woman who could lure him away from her, much
less over-bid her in the myriad, continual satisfactions she
rendered him.
Was this, then, he asked himself, the dreaded contingency of all
fond Benedicts, to be her first "affair?" He tormented himself
with the ever iterant query, and, to the astonishment of the
reformed Kohala poker crowd of wise and middle-aged youngsters as
well as to the reward of the keen scrutiny of the dinner-giving and
dinner-attending women, he began to drink King William instead of
orange juice, to bully up the poker limit, to drive of nights his
own car more than rather recklessly over the Pali and Diamond Head
roads, and, ere dinner or lunch or after, to take more than an
average man's due of old-fashioned cocktails and Scotch highs.
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