loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly
proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected,
in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of
feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he
had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged
by the thought that all this frankness and innocence
were only an artificial product. Untrained human
nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the
twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt
himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity,
so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers
and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses,
because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what
he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his
lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of
snow.

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they
were those habitual to young men on the approach of
their wedding day. But they were generally accompanied
by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of
which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not
deplore (as Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated
him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his
bride in exchange for the unblemished one she was to
give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if
he had been brought up as she had they would have
been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes
in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations,
see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected