used to the thought of it, darling--I simply can't. You're so sacred to
me. There's something about the woman a man loves that's different from
every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens
me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always
think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle--"
Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly
and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.

As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation
was becoming intolerable--that it was an affront not only to his ideal
of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that
peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as
"Southern." His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady"
that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though
he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and
determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without
difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her
sex. By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her
with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.

"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.
Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in
a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she
had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her
sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well
that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble
a star--that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in
Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of
poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance