Bella’s affair and elopement with Duncan Wedderburn

Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless’s affair and elopement with Duncan Wedderburn begin as a deliberate experiment in desire, not as a planned marriage. Hoping to learn whether another man could match the feeling she experienced with Archibald McCandless, she seduces Wedderburn, accepts the elopement without understanding that he intends it to involve marriage, and later remains connected to him after their relationship has collapsed.

The kiss that prompts an experiment

In the week after kissing Archibald McCandless, Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless finds the kiss occupying her thoughts and daydreams. She wonders whether the pleasure came specifically from McCandless or whether another man might produce the same combination of power and helplessness. The question is not merely abstract: she decides to test it by seducing Duncan Wedderburn, a man she says she had never previously considered and who, by her account, had likewise never considered her.

The experiment follows a distinct logic. Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless is trying to understand her own response to McCandless by introducing another lover, rather than choosing Wedderburn after a courtship or out of an intention to marry him. The possibility that another man might affect her more strongly is part of what drives her, making the affair a test of desire as well as an act of desire.

Wedderburn’s proposal and Godwin’s warning

Wedderburn is presented as conventional and as devoted to his selfish mother. Marriage, Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless says, had not occurred to him before they became lovers; afterward, it occurred to him immediately. He proposes that they elope, but she does not understand that he means their departure to involve marriage. She instead imagines a pleasurable experiment, a voyage through which she can discover how suitable McCandless is.

Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless explains her plan to Godwin Baxter. He tells her that he cannot teach her about love and urges her to treat Wedderburn gently, warning that Wedderburn is not strong-headed and that McCandless, too, will suffer when he learns what has happened. His response recognizes consequences her own experimental framing leaves at the margins: Wedderburn’s vulnerability and the injury to McCandless are not, for her, the central questions driving the affair.

After the affair

Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless later describes enjoying Wedderburn while the relationship lasted and being gentle with him when he fell apart. The affair is over, but the connection does not simply disappear: she visits him once a month in the lunatic asylum, where he is bright and cheerful and greets her with a mischievous wink and knowing grin.

She suspects that Wedderburn’s insanity began as a pretence intended to avoid imprisonment for embezzling clients’ funds, while insisting that it has since become real. Her account therefore leaves two explanations in tension: an apparent attempt to evade legal punishment and an illness that is no longer feigned. The visits show a continuing familiarity after the experiment has ended, without recasting their affair as a lasting marriage or settled romance.