Spellbinders by Margaret Culkin Banning

A glaze settled over the surface of events for the next few weeks in the Flandon household. Both Gage and Helen were torn away from too much indulgence in their own thoughts by the implacability of the things which they must do. Having broken up his legal connections with his own hands, Gage was confronted with the necessity of in some way making his next steps justify his past action and an unholy pride made him determined to show a doubting business world that he had been actuated by deep and skillful motives. There was the alternative of leaving St. Pierre and that he was disinclined to do. He wanted to start an office of his own and demonstrate with the greatest possible rapidity that nothing but benefit had accrued to him from his break with Sable. He guessed what he did not hear of the doubts about his move, and he wanted to put the world in the wrong if possible.

It was true, while he had found Sable's intervention in the matter of Freda the unbearable breaking point, that he had a kind of long deferred zest in contemplating his new business freedom. Sable's offer had been, in the beginning, far too lucrative and too flattering to lose but there was a cautiousness, a lack of independence in many of their mutual actions which had galled Gage. He was tired of the connection. He was at odds with the political clique to which his close connection with the Congressman held him. He was disgusted with the result of the convention -- not that he had hoped for much but the flatness of the political outlook, the beating of the old drums irritated him. There were times when the exhilaration of the chance he was taking lifted him up and if he had been drinking less steadily he might have turned the exhilaration to much advantage. But his mind was too nervous to plan steadily or well. It shot restlessly past immediacies into dreams of a future when he would have justified every action to himself and the world and particularly to Helen.