arge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to
soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she
would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the
focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was
a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless
morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must
not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.

This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman--the
woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her
daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to
his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his
purpose as any within the four seas.

For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:
he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the
woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever
she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable
character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted
with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having
nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her
connections--a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer
of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
enthusiasm, sentiment--Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta
as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave
campaign of matrimony.

It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed
that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from
the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston,
she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home
for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed;
and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home
about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife
carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him
a choice in the matter.

"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when
her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice
now: what is your impression of her?'"

"She is prettier than ever--imp