Nothing But Money A Novel - 1865 Author:T. S. Arthur Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. T was beyond the reach of Adam Guy's imagination to picture his young wife sitting tearful, or in sad, half dreamy abstraction, for an hour a... more »fter he went away, and all for what he had said about a useless flower. Would his thought have grown tender toward her, if he had known the truth ? Would he have chid- ed himself, for letting so small a matter come in to mar the happiness of a young heart, that was beating so true to love and him ? No. His thought would have grown sterner, and he would have approved to himself all the coldly-wise sentiments which had been spoken. He would have felt angry toward the flower, which he had only despised as worthless. Yet, so it was with Lydia. She had a true woman's sensitive appreciation of all things beautiful in nature. From a child, she had been a lover of the earth's bright and beautiful children, the flowers. They spoke to her in a language not understood by grosser natures; and, in their presence, she felt like one lifted into some purer sphere. To hear the flowers centemned by lips, whose words had come so often in music to her ears — from lips to which her ear must bend and listen in all herafter-life — ah, that was no light thing ! We do not wonder at her tears. Then, there seemed to her such a hard, cold, calcu I lating vein, in what her husband had said — a spirit not seen before — an intense worldliness — a bowing down to the worship of the lowest and most external things — and an elevation of money as the greatest good. Suddenly, there had come to her a new revelation of his character — not that he had never spoken of economy and prudence — of the repression of vagrant desires, and the folly of waste. These were his favorite themes ; and, as he had usually presented them, her thought approved. She would ...« less