engagements. There had never been any secret with them about their
affairs. On this matter the practice is very various among different
people. There are families who think it almost indelicate to talk about
marriage as a thing actually in prospect for any of their own community.
An ordinary acquaintance would be considered to be impertinent in even
hinting at such a thing, although the thing were an established fact.
The engaged young ladies only whisper the news through the very depths
of their pink note-paper, and are supposed to blush as they communicate
the tidings by their pens, even in the retirement of their own rooms.
But there are other families in which there is no vestige of such
mystery, in which an engaged couple are spoken of together as openly as
though they were already bound in some sort of public partnership. In
these families the young ladies talk openly of their lovers, and
generally prefer that subject of conversation to any other. Such a
family--so little mysterious--so open in their arrangements, was that of
the Burtons at Stratton. The reserve in the reserved families is usually
atoned for by the magnificence of the bridal arrangements, when the
marriage is at last solemnized; whereas, among the other set--the people
who have no reserve--the marriage, when it comes, is customarily an
affair of much less outward ceremony. They are married without blast of
trumpet, with very little profit to the confectioner, and do their
honeymoon, if they do it at all, with prosaic simplicity.

Florence had made up her mind that she would be in no hurry about it.
Harry was in a hurry; but that was a matter of course. He was a
quick-blooded, impatient, restless being. She was slower, and more given
to consideration. It would be better that they should wait, even if it
were for five or six years. She had no fear of poverty for herself. She
had lived always in a house in which money was much regarded, and among
people who were of inexpensive habits. But such had not been his lot,