marrying again, but
my mother's words appealed to me with some force when I reflected that
I owed it to my country not to lead a life of selfish celibacy. I would
never love with the strength of my first love which I had given to
Anna; but there seemed to be no reason why I should not become the head
of a house, and the father of a family, so that I might live again in
my children.

Now, it so fell out that Pauline Rutter, a niece of De Decker, came at
this time to stay with her uncle at Amsterdam, and as I was a frequent
visitor at De Decker's house, I often met her. Pauline was proud, dark,
and self-willed--the very opposite of what Anna Holstein had been when
I married her, and for this reason, perhaps, I liked her the more,
since it put an end to all comparison between her and Anna, to whom I
had given my first love.

Pauline was flattered by the attention I paid her, and when at length I
asked her to become my wife she made no secret of her satisfaction at
the prospect of becoming Madam Van Bu.

"I have always thought, sir," she said, "that you would marry again. It
is a duty which you owe to your wealth and position. That your choice
should have fallen upon me is an honour of which I am very sensible."

It will thus be seen that in the alliance which Pauline and I proposed
there was to be no love-making. The bargain was one that might have
been made in the course of De Decker's business. I was to give Pauline
my wealth and name, in return for which she promised to become my wife,
and to undertake the management of my household. It was a shameful
bargain, and I was well served for my part in it.

We had not been married a month before each of us began to observe in
the other an incompatibility of temper which made any kind of agreement
between us, even on the most trivial matters, impossible. Pauline
declared that I brought the manners of the forecastle into her
drawing-room, while the social inanities to which she devoted most of
her time angered me into upbraiding her with her frivolity and lack of
common sense. These mutual recriminations soon led us into a condition
of life which destroyed all prospect of peace and contentment in our
home. Neither would give way one jot. The more Pauline stormed at me
for my boorishness and want of consideration for her the more obstinate
did I become in ascribing to her frivolous nature the true cause of our
unhappiness. I admired Pauline, and I looked to her to become t