their own histories. But far from questioning their credentials,
the women and girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught
something of an English accent and something of an English
arrogance.

So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and
innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that
feels itself so wise--Clara, who knew, because her two older
sisters were married, where babies come from, and knew, because of
Alta Porter's experience, that girls--nice girls, who went with
one through the high school--can yield to temptation and be
ruined--Clara only felt, in shyly announcing her engagement to
Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been too kind.

That this glittering stranger twice her age--why, he was even a
little bald--a man who had travelled, who knew people of title,
knew books, and manners, and languages--that he should marry an
undertaker's daughter in Los Lobos! It was unbelievable. Clara's
only misgiving during her short engagement was that he would
disappear like a dream. She agreed with everything he said; even
carrying her new allegiance to the point of laughing a little at
her own people: the layer cakes her mother made for the Sunday
noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled swain who called on her
younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter evenings; and the
fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.

A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her
innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed
of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little
doubtful of her parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple