real shy, beautiful man of the world, didn't hop on one foot, didn't
skip and jump, as if he were playing an urchins' game, but toward
which he proceeded with a deep and anxious, a noble and highly just
deliberation.

For it was one thing to stare at a girl till she was bored with it, it
was one thing to take her to the Horse Show and the Opera, and to
send her flowers by the stack, and chocolates by the ton, and "great"
novels, the very latest and greatest, by the dozen; but something
quite other to hold open for her, with eyes attached to eyes, the
gate, moving on such stiff silver hinges, of the grand square
forecourt of the palace of wedlock. The state of being "engaged"
represented to him the introduction to this precinct of some young
woman with whom his outside parley would have had the duration,
distinctly, of his own convenience. That might be cold-blooded if one
chose to think so; but nothing of another sort would equal the high
ceremony and dignity and decency, above all the grand gallantry and
finality, of their then passing in. Poor Julia could have blushed red,
before that view, with the memory of the way the forecourt, as she now
imagined it, had been dishonored by her younger romps. She had tumbled
over the wall with this, that, and the other raw playmate, and had
played "tag" and leap-frog, as she might say, from corner to corner.
That would be the "history" with which, in case of definite demand,
she should be able to supply Mr. French: that she had already, again
and again, any occasion offering, chattered and scuffled over ground
provided, according to his idea, for walking the gravest of minuets.
If that then had been all their _kind_ of history, hers and her
mother's, at least there was plenty of it: it was the superstructure
raised on the other group of facts, those of the order of their having
been always so perfectly pink and white, so perfectly possessed of