rsatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully
trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his
marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a
dull association of material and social interests held together by
ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. Lawrence
Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely
realised this enviable ideal. As became the high-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 other men's
wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "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 became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had
what was known in New York as "another establishment."

Archer tried to console himself with the thought 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 him to do no
less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having
had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that
people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is
dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

The result, of course, was that the young girl who was 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 man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the
radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,
her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and
ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She ha