d
advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,
but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was
straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly
proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths
of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy
to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned
discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were
only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and
innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive
guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious
purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts
and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to
be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might
exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those
habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But they
were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement
of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as
Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a
blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she
was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had
been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find
their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his
anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected
with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)
why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of
experience as himself.
Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind;
but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision
were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska. Here he
was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure thoughts
and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised
all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie. "Hang
Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to
undress. He could not really see why her fate should have the least
bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to
measure the r
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