dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given
her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables, when
they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in well-attested but
sordid facts. She believed that a gentleman with a long pedigree must be
of necessity a very fine fellow, and enjoyment of a chance to carry
further a family chronicle begun ever so far back must be, as a
consciousness, a source of the most beautiful impulses. It wasn't
therefore only that noblesse oblige, she thought, as regards yourself,
but that it ensures as nothing else does in respect to your wife. She
had never, at the start, spoken to a nobleman in her life, and these
convictions were but a matter of extravagant theory. They were the
fruit, in part, of the perusal of various Ultramontane works of fiction
--the only ones admitted to the convent library--in which the hero was
always a Legitimist vicomte who fought duels by the dozen but went twice
a month to confession; and in part of the strong social scent of the
gossip of her companions, many of them filles de haut lieu who, in the
convent-garden, after Sundays at home, depicted their brothers and
cousins as Prince Charmings and young Paladins. Euphemia listened and
said nothing; she shrouded her visions of matrimony under a coronet in
the silence that mostly surrounds all ecstatic faith. She was not of
that type of young lady who is easily induced to declare that her
husband must be six feet high and a little near-sighted, part his hair
in the middle and have amber lights in his beard. To her companions her
flights of fancy seemed short, rather, and poor and untutored; and even
the fact that she was a sprig of the transatlantic democracy never
sufficiently explained her apathy on social questions. She had a mental
image of that son of the Crusaders who was to suffer her to adore him,
but like many an artist who has produced a masterpiece of idealisation
she shrank from exposing it to public criticism. It was the portrait of
a gentleman rather ugly than handsome and rather poor than rich. But his