side the pale of her approbation any
unfortunate who exhibited it. She preferred stupidity to common sense,
when the former was allied with good form, and the latter only with
plain kindliness. This was partly instinct and partly the result of
cultivation. She would shrink, with uncontrollable disgust, from any of
the lower classes with whom she came unavoidably in contact. A slight
breach of the conventions earned her distrust of one of her own caste.
As this personal idiosyncrasy fell in line with the de Laney pride, it
was approved by the head of the family. Under encouragement it became
almost a monomania.

Bennington pictured to himself only too vividly the effect of the
Lawtons on this lady's aristocratic prejudices. He knew, only too well,
that Bill Lawton's table manners would not be allowed even in her
kitchen. He could imagine Mrs. Lawton's fatuous conversation in the de
Laney's drawing-room, or Maude Eliza's dressed-up self-consciousness.
The experience of having the three Westerners to dinner just once
would, Bennington knew, drive his lady mother to the verge of nervous
prostration--he remembered his father's one and only experience in
bringing business connections home to lunch--; his imagination failed
to picture the effect of her having to endure them as actual members of
the family! As if this were not bad enough, his restless fancy carried
him a step farther. He perceived the agonies of shame and
mortification, real even though they were conventional, she would have
to endure in the face of society. That the de Laneys, social leaders,
rigid in respectability, should be forced to the humiliation of
acknowledging a misalliance, should be forced to the added humiliation
of confessing that this marriage was not only with a family of inferior
social standing, but with one actually unlettered and vulgar!
Bennington knew only too well the temper of his mother--and of society.

It would not be difficult to expand these doubts, to amplify these
reasons, and even to adduce others which occurred to the unhappy young
man as he climbed the hill. But enough has been said. Surely the
reader, no matter how removed in sympathy from that line of argument,
must be able now at least to sympathize, to perceive that Bennington de
Laney had some reason for thought, some excuse for the tardiness of his
steps as they carried him to a meeting with the girl he loved.

For he did love her, perhaps the more tenderly that doubts