spread
miles upon miles of sunny grass lands and ripened orchards and waving
forests, and through these he hunts with his laughing companions or
walks gently with his lady. He has servants by the thousand, each
anxious to die for him, and his wealth, prodigious beyond the
computation of avarice, is stored in underground chambers, whose low,
tortuous passages lead to labyrinths of vaults, massy and impregnable.

Mary Makebelieve would have loved to wed a lord. If a lord had come to
her when she paced softly through a forest, or stood alone on the
seashore, or crouched among the long grass of a windy plain, she would
have placed her hands in his and followed him and loved him truly
forever. But she did not believe that these things happened nowadays,
nor did her mother. Nowadays! her mother looked on these paltry times
with an eye whose scorn was complicated by fury. Mean, ugly days,
mean, ugly lives, and mean, ugly people, said her mother, that's all
one can get nowadays, and then she spoke of the people whose houses
she washed out and whose staircases she scrubbed down, and her
old-ivory face flamed from her black hair and her deep, dark eyes
whirled and became hard and motionless as points of jet, and her hands
jumped alternately into knuckles and claws.

But it became increasingly evident to Mary Makebelieve that marriage
was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not
drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by
these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with
undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people
had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six
feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that
depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smolder and be
fanned, and, perhaps, blaze up and flare across a county or a country
to warm the cold hands of many a shriveled person.

How did all these people come together? She did not yet understand the
basic necessity that drives the male to the female. Sex was not yet to
her a physiological distinction, it was only a differentiation of
clothing, a matter of whiskers and no whiskers: but she had begun to
take a new and peculiar interest in men. One of these hurrying or
loitering strangers might be the husband whom fate had ordained for
her. She would scarcely have been surprised if one of the men who
looked at her casually in the stree