ich bid
graceful defiance to analysis, had never been so much on show, even to
the very casual critic lodged, as might be said, in an out-of-the-way
corner of it; it seemed really to reflect the purity of Euphemia's pious
opinion. There had been nothing especially to admire in the state of
mind in which he left Paris--a settled resolve to marry a young person
whose charms might or might not justify his sister's account of them,
but who was mistress, at the worst, of a couple of hundred thousand
francs a year. He had not counted out sentiment--if she pleased him so
much the better; but he had left a meagre margin for it and would hardly
have admitted that so excellent a match could be improved by it. He was
a robust and serene sceptic, and it was a singular fate for a man who
believed in nothing to be so tenderly believed in. What his original
faith had been he could hardly have told you, for as he came back to his
childhood's home to mend his fortunes by pretending to fall in love he
was a thoroughly perverse creature and overlaid with more corruptions
than a summer day's questioning of his conscience would have put to
flight. Ten years' pursuit of pleasure, which a bureau full of unpaid
bills was all he had to show for, had pretty well stifled the natural
lad whose violent will and generous temper might have been shaped by
a different pressure to some such showing as would have justified a
romantic faith. So should he have exhaled the natural fragrance of a
late-blooming flower of hereditary honour. His violence indeed had been
subdued and he had learned to be irreproachably polite; but he had lost
the fineness of his generosity, and his politeness, which in the long
run society paid for, was hardly more than a form of luxurious egotism,
like his fondness for ciphered pocket-handkerchiefs, lavender gloves
and other fopperies by which shopkeepers remained out of pocket. In
after-years he was terribly polite to his wife. He had formed himself,
as the phrase was, and the form prescribed to him by the society into
which his birth and his tastes had introduced him was marked by some
peculiar features. That which mainly concerns us is its classification
of the fairer half of humanity as objects not essentially different--say
from those very lavender gloves that are soiled in an evening and
thrown away. To do M. de Mauves justice, he had in the course of time
encountered in the feminine character such plentiful evidence of its