of unwonted opportunity, however--of such a possible value constituted
for him as he had never before been invited to rise to--made him with
the lapse of time more confident, possibly more reckless. It was too
inspiring not to act upon the idea of kindling a truer light in his fair
countrywoman's slow smile, and at least he hoped to persuade her that
even a raw representative of the social order she had not done justice
to was not necessarily a mere fortuitous collocation of atoms. He
immediately called on her.



II

She had been placed for her education, fourteen years before, in a
Parisian convent, by a widowed mammma who was fonder of Homburg and Nice
than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing
daughter. Here, besides various elegant accomplishments--the art of
wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting a cup of tea--she
acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for a
sign of precocious worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a man of
hierarchical "rank"--not for the pleasure of hearing herself called
Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never
greatly care, but because she had a romantic belief that the enjoyment
of inherited and transmitted consideration, consideration attached to
the fact of birth, would be the direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy of
feeling. She supposed it would be found that the state of being noble
does actually enforce the famous obligation. Romances are rarely worked
out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia's excuse was the prime
purity of her moral vision. She was essentially incorruptible, and she
took this pernicious conceit to her bosom very much as if it had been a