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Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most coh-priest of form, he had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with otherthat "Lawrence was so frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as becain) had as known in New York as "another establishht that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected hied to si had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Pri to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent
The result, of course, was that the young girl as the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life"
The young hted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horseainning to develop under his guidance (She had advanced far enough to join hi, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters) She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of hu at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly rand-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he e made of snow