moral vision. She was essentially incorruptible, and she
took this pernicious conceit to her bosom very much as if it had been a
dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given
her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables,
when they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in well-attested but
sordid facts. She believed that a gentleman with a long pedigree must
be of necessity a very fine fellow, and enjoyment of a chance to
carry further a family chronicle begun ever so far back must be, as
a consciousness, a source of the most beautiful impulses. It wasn't
therefore only that noblesse oblige, she thought, as regards yourself,
but that it ensures as nothing else does in respect to your wife. She
had never, at the start, spoken to a nobleman in her life, and these
convictions were but a matter of extravagant theory. They were the
fruit, in part, of the perusal of various Ultramontane works of
fiction--the only ones admitted to the convent library--in which the
hero was always a Legitimist vicomte who fought duels by the dozen but
went twice a month to confession; and in part of the strong social scent
of the gossip of her companions, many of them filles de haut lieu who,
in the convent-garden, after Sundays at home, depicted their brothers
and cousins as Prince Charmings and young Paladins. Euphemia listened
and said nothing; she shrouded her visions of matrimony under a coronet
in the silence that mostly surrounds all ecstatic faith. She was not
of that type of young lady who is easily induced to declare that her
husband must be six feet high and a little near-sighted, part his hair
in the middle and have amber lights in his beard. To her companions her
flights of fancy seemed short, rather, and poor and untutored; and
even the fact that she was a sprig of the transatlantic democracy never
sufficiently explained her apathy on social questions. She had a mental
image of that son of the Crusaders who was to suffer her to adore him,
but like many an artist who has produced a masterpiece of idealisation
she shrank from exposing it to public criticism. It was the portrait of
a gentleman rather ugly than handsome and rather poor than rich. But his
ugliness was to be nobly expressive and his poverty delicately proud.
She had a fortune of her own which, at the proper time, after fixing on
her in eloquent silence those fine eyes that were to soften the feudal
severity of his visage, h