ich lucky young girls were addressed on
their engagement by wise old women of quality.

At her convent, to which she immediately returned, she found a letter
from her mother which disconcerted her far more than the remarks of
Madame de Mauves. Who were these people, Mrs. Cleve demanded, who had
presumed to talk to her daughter of marriage without asking her leave?
Questionable gentlefolk plainly; the best French people never did such
things. Euphemia would return straightway to her convent, shut herself
up and await her own arrival. It took Mrs. Cleve three weeks to
travel from Nice to Paris, and during this time the young girl had
no communication with her lover beyond accepting a bouquet of violets
marked with his initials and left by a female friend. "I've not brought
you up with such devoted care," she declared to her daughter at their
first interview, "to marry a presumptuous and penniless Frenchman. I
shall take you straight home and you'll please forget M. de Mauves."

Mrs. Cleve received that evening at her hotel a visit from this
personage which softened her wrath but failed to modify her decision. He
had very good manners, but she was sure he had horrible morals; and the
lady, who had been a good-natured censor on her own account, felt a deep
and real need to sacrifice her daughter to propriety. She belonged to
that large class of Americans who make light of their native land
in familiar discourse but are startled back into a sense of having
blasphemed when they find Europeans taking them at their word. "I know
the type, my dear," she said to her daughter with a competent nod. "He
won't beat you. Sometimes you'll wish he would."

Euphemia remained solemnly silent, for the only answer she felt capable
of making was that her mother's mind was too small a measure of things
and her lover's type an historic, a social masterpiece that it took some
mystic illumination to appreciate. A person who confounded him with the
common throng of her watering-place acquaintance was not a person to
argue with. It struck the girl she had simply no cause to plead; her
cause was in the Lord's hands and in those of M. de Mauves.

This agent of Providence had been irritated and mortified by Mrs.
Cleve's opposition, and hardly knew how to handle an adversary who
failed to perceive that a member of his family gave of necessity more
than he received. But he had obtained information on his return to Paris
which exalted the uses of hum