ked to the theological professors whose salaries he
paid, for he saw that they had a sort of grave, formal tradition of the
sacredness of marriage. And he had a right to claim that to him it was
sacred, at least as yet; all the ideal side of his nature was suddenly
developed; he walked in a dream; he even read Tennyson.

Sometimes he talked a little to his future brother-in-law,
Harry,--assuming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters on their
ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true
as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned
girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard
to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings
of generous devotion from John Lambert.

"I don't know how it is, Henry," the merchant would gravely say, "I
can't get rightly used to it, that I feel so strange. Honestly, now, I
feel as if I was beginning life over again. It ain't a selfish feeling,
so I know there's some good in it. I used to be selfish enough, but I
ain't so to her. You may not think it, but if it would make her happy, I
believe I could lie down and let her carriage roll over me. By -----,
I would build her a palace to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate
myself, just to see her pass by. That is, if she was to live in it alone
by herself. I couldn't stand sharing her. It must be me or nobody."

Probably there was no male acquaintance of the parties, however
hardened, to whom these fine flights would have seemed more utterly
preposterous than to the immediate friend and prospective bridesmaid,
Miss Blanche Ingleside. To that young lady, trained sedulously by a
devoted mother, life was really a serious thing. It meant the full rigor
of the marriage market, tempered only by dancing and new dresses. There
was a stern sense of duty beneath all her robing and disrobing; she
conscientiously did what was expected of her, and took her little
amusements meanwhile. It was supposed that most of the purchasers in the
market preferred slang and bare shoulders, and so she favored them with
plenty of both. It was merely the law of supply and demand. Had John
Lambert once hinted that he would accept her in decent black, she would
have gone to the next ball as a Sister of Charity; but where was the
need of it, when she and her mother both knew that, had she appeared as
the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, she would not have won him? So her