romantic faith. So should he have exhaled the natural fragrance of a
late-blooming flower of hereditary honour. His violence indeed had been
subdued and he had learned to be irreproachably polite; but he had lost
the fineness of his generosity, and his politeness, which in the long
run society paid for, was hardly more than a form of luxurious egotism,
like his fondness for ciphered pocket-handkerchiefs, lavender gloves and
other fopperies by which shopkeepers remained out of pocket. In after-
years he was terribly polite to his wife. He had formed himself, as the
phrase was, and the form prescribed to him by the society into which his
birth and his tastes had introduced him was marked by some peculiar
features. That which mainly concerns us is its classification of the
fairer half of humanity as objects not essentially different--say from
those very lavender gloves that are soiled in an evening and thrown
away. To do M. de Mauves justice, he had in the course of time
encountered in the feminine character such plentiful evidence of its
pliant softness and fine adjustability that idealism naturally seemed to
him a losing game.

Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means
contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are
generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source
of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration,
and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would be
exposed to a danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered
herself that in this whole matter she was very laudably rigid, might
almost have taken a lesson from the delicacy he practised. For two or
three weeks her grandson was well-nigh a blushing boy again. He watched
from behind the Figaro, he admired and desired and held his tongue. He
found himself not in the least moved to a flirtation; he had no wish to
trouble the waters he proposed to transfuse into the golden cup of