0.1 Book report on "advesary in the house_part2" by irving stone.  (Page 4/5)

Could he offer Gloria a fragment, a residue, a life of uncertainty because he would forever be wedded to something he loved more than he did his own wife?

Eugene’s indecisiveness forced Gloria into matrimonial alliance with Ned Harness, a first class practising lawyer in Chicago and the very anti-thesis of Eugene V. Debs.

Eugene continued to go steady with his first love which was trade unionism. Within five years Eugene was at the zenith of his carrier. Now Eugene could offer everything which a wife desired. But whom would he offer all this? At about this time Kate Mertzon appeared in Eugene’s life.

Kate never revealed her true nature before their marriage. Kate saw unionism, which was Eugene’s first love, as a ladder in climbing up the social hierarchy. Katie was confident that through her love, affection and cajoling she would manage to reform her wayward, socialistic and anarchist but otherwise very brilliant, capable and dynamic Eugene. This was Kate’s biggest miscalculation which was going to turn them into the biggest adversaries. That is precisely why the title of the book is “Adversary in the house”.

In 1890 when Kate refused to be at Eugene’s side during his trial for his role in the latest Railroad strike, then it was Gloria who sat through all the sessions of his long trial. Gloria’s husband, Ned Harness, was the persecution Lawyer.

When Eugene saw Gloria in the court, he thought,

“She is more beautiful than ever. And so cosmopolitan. Only her eyes were unfamiliar. They were grave, not unhappy perhaps, but brooding. His own eyes became glazed, his inside felt hurt and hollow.

Why has she come? To see me accused, humiliated? To prove to herself that she was right in marrying Ned Harness? It is seventeen years since she said she loved me. Has time changed her so much? Have wealth and social position so captured her that she believes me to be a miscreant, and takes her place behind the persecution?

Or was she only demonstrating her loyalty to her husband? For he knew that if Gloria had been his beloved wife she would have been sitting in the front row behind the defence table.”

At the finish of the cross-examination when Gloria’s husband passed the severest indictment against Eugene V. Debs, Gloria could not bear it and walked out of the court.

At the end of the Rail- road strike trial though Eugene was acquitted of the conspiracy charge but was served a six month term in Atlanta penitentiary. While he was still in police custody Gloria came to see him.

He did not hear her enter, did not even know she was there until she sat beside him on the bench and turned her eyes full on his. In maturing she had fulfilled all the promises of the beautiful young girl he had known so long before:

Her eyes were deep, safe harbours for anyone’s pain; her cheeks had slimmed, her bosom deepened, yet even after having borne two children, her figure was a slender and graceful as the seventeen-year-old who had leaned up high, very high, to get her hands locked about his neck while he held her supple body against him and kissed the sweet loving lips eagerly but tenderly for time eternity. All so many, many years ago.