The Reaping by Mary Imlay Taylor

FOX had not seen Rose alone since that night, now some weeks distant, when, after a bitter struggle with himself, he had definitely accepted the inexorable fact of Margaret's demand upon him. To injure a woman, however unwittingly, seemed to him contemptible, even when he secretly raged against the injustice of her claims and repudiated them in his heart with something akin to savage anger. It had been a bitter experience, a shock to his egotism, to his infatuated belief in himself, that belief which comes sometimes to genius with the force of absolute conviction.

The adjournment of Congress had left him more at liberty than usual and he was anxious to leave the city, yet to do so would be interpreted as flight. He had purposely absented himself from White's house, and Margaret, understanding his mood, had refrained from communicating with him, but he was instinctively aware that she was unshaken in her resolution, and the news of the open rupture came to him almost as a relief; it was over, and it was useless to indulge in vague hopes and futile thoughts of escape from his responsibility; he must meet the fate that his folly and selfishness had invited, and with it the wreck of his own happiness! And he was a strong willed, selfish man; it was well nigh impossible to yield to such a course, to give up, to let Rose go just when it seemed most possible to win her. As for Margaret, the manner in which he thought of her, the wretched obstinacy with which her fate entangled his, argued ill indeed for her future hope of happiness if he married her. If he yielded that reluctant assent to the situation, if he accepted the claim she made upon him, it might be a bare and cruel fate for both. He was himself unaware of the impossibility of concealment, that his final indifference would be more cruel, more deadly than present repudiation. He thought, instead, of himself, of the wreck of a dream which had filled his soul with the beautiful and tender amenities of love and loyalty and protection; he forgot that a man can hide his heart as little as the leopard can change his spots, and that a woman can suffer more in its revelation than she would from physical brutality.