ught and feeling side by side with such
strange shallows of social and intellectual ignorance--though reticent
she was so direct, though tenacious so simple, her love, if difficult
to win, had such marvelous vitality when won--that he felt as if
she spoke a language sweeter and purer in many of its tones than the
current speech of society, but a language with which neither his own
people nor that society would ever be familiar.

Amorous and easily impressed as he was, her beauty drew him with its
subtle charm, but his doubt and her pride interposed barriers which
even he dared not disregard; and at the end of two months he was no
nearer than at the beginning that understanding which he would have
established with any other pretty woman in less than a week. And he
was no surer of himself and what he did really desire. Yet, accustomed
as he was to loves as easily won as the gathering of a flower by the
wayside, and to the knowledge that Adelaide Birkett, his social match
in all things, was ready to pick up the handkerchief when he should
think fit to throw it, this very doubt both of himself and Leam made
half the interest if all the perplexity of the situation. He knew, as
well as he knew that the Corinthian shaft should bear the Corinthian
capital, if it was Leam whom he loved it was Adelaide whom he ought to
marry. She would carry incense to the gods of British respectability
as a squire's lady should, doing nothing that should not be done and
leaving as little undone that should be done. She would preside at
the Hill dinners with grace and join the meet at the coverside with
punctuality; she would dress as became her position, but neither
extravagantly nor questionably, and she would be more likely to stint
than to squander; she would live as a polite Christian should, in
the odor of genteel righteousness, not a fibre laid cross to the
conventional grain, not a note out of tune with the orthodox chord.
Yes, it was the rector's daughter whom he ought to marry, but it was
Pepita's whom he loved. Yet how would things go with such a perplexing
iconoclast at the head of affairs? Imagine the feelings of an English
squire, M.H. of his county, loving dogs and horses as some women love
children, and regarding poaching and vulpicide as crimes almost as
bad as murder--imagine his feelings when his beautiful wife, grave and
simple, should say at a hunt-dinner, "I do not like riding. I think
hunting stupid and cruel: an army of me