Beyond The Rocks

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Beyond The Rocks

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beyond The Rocks, by Elinor Glyn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Beyond The Rocks A Love Story
Author: Elinor Glyn
Release Date: September 14, 2005 [EBook #16692]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Beyond the Rocks
[Illustration: Rodolph Valentino, as Lord Bracondale and Elinor Glyn, the author.]
_Beyond the Rocks
A Love Story
by
Elinor Glyn
Author of "Three Weeks"
With illustrations From the Paramount Photo-Play
Produced by Famous Players-Lasky Corp.
starring Gloria Swanson with Rodolph Valentino
New York The Macaulay Company_ Printed in the U.S.A.

ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE
Rodolph Valentino, as Lord Bracondale and Elinor Glyn, the author Frontispiece "She Wondered What Love Was--" 8
"Once Upon a Time There Was a Fairy Prince and Princess--" 96
What Could He Say to Her-- 314

Beyond the Rocks

I
The hours were composed mostly of dull or rebellious moments during the period of Theodora's engagement to Mr. Brown. From the very first she had thought it hard that she should have had to take this situation, instead of Sarah or Clementine, her elder step-sisters, so much nearer his age than herself. To do them justice, either of these ladies would have been glad to relieve her of the obligation to become Mrs. Brown, but Mr. Brown thought otherwise.
A young and beautiful wife was what he bargained for.
To enter a family composed of three girls--two of the first family, one almost thirty and a second very plain--a father with a habit of accumulating debts and obliged to live at Bruges and inexpensive foreign sea-side towns, required a strong motive; and this Josiah Brown found in the deliciously rounded, white velvet cheek of Theodora, the third daughter, to say nothing of her slender grace, the grace of a young fawn, and a pair of gentian-blue eyes that said things to people in the first glance.
Poor, foolish, handsome Dominic Fitzgerald, light-hearted, débonair Irish gentleman, gay and gallant on his miserable pension of a broken and retired Guardsman, had had just sufficient sense to insist upon magnificent settlements, certainly prompted thereto by Clementine, who inherited the hard-headedness of the early defunct Scotch mother, as well as her high cheek-bones. That affair had been a youthful _mésalliance_.
"You had better see we all gain something by it, papa," she had said. "Make the old bore give Theodora a huge allowance, and have it all fixed and settled by law beforehand. She is such a fool about money--just like you--she will shower it upon us; and you make him pay you a sum down as well."
Captain Fitzgerald fortunately consulted an honest solicitor, and so things were arranged to the satisfaction of all parties concerned except Theodora herself, who found the whole affair far from her taste.
That one must marry a rich man if one got the chance, to help poor, darling papa, had always been part of her creed, more or less inspired by papa himself. But when it came to the scratch, and Josiah Brown was offered as a husband, Theodora had had to use every bit of her nerve and self-control to prevent herself from refusing.
She had not seen many men in her nineteen years of out-at-elbows life, but she had imagination, and the one or two peeps at smart old friends of papa's, landed from stray yachts now and then, at out-of-the-way French watering-places, had given her an ideal far, far removed from the personality of Josiah Brown.
But, as Sarah explained to her, such men could never be husbands. They might be lovers, if one was fortunate enough to move in their sphere, but husbands--never! and there was no use Theodora protesting this violent devotion to darling papa, if she could not do a small thing like marrying Josiah Brown for him!
Theodora's beautiful mother, dead in the first year of her runaway marriage, had been the daughter of a stiff-necked, unforgiving old earl; she had bequeathed her child, besides these gentian eyes and wonderful, silvery blond hair, a warm, generous heart and a more or less romantic temperament.
The heart was touched by darling papa's needs, and the romantic temperament revolted by Josiah Brown's personality.
However, there it was! The marriage took place at the Consulate at Dieppe, and a perfectly miserable little bride got into the train for Paris, accompanied by a fat, short, prosperous, middle-class English husband, who had accumulated a large fortune in Australia, quite by accident, in a comparatively few years.
Josiah Brown was only fifty-two, though his head was bald and his figure far from slight. He had a liver, a chest, and a temper,