er, and that if he should ask her to do so he should shock and
grieve her, and inflict upon himself an incurable wound.

During this last absence of his he had let his fancy dwell constantly
upon her, until life seemed worth having only if she would share it with
him. He was an artist, and he had always been a bohemian, but at heart he
was philistine and bourgeois. His ideal was a settlement, a fixed
habitation, a stated existence, a home where he could work constantly in
an air of affection, and unselfishly do his part to make his home happy.
It was a very simple-hearted ambition, and I do not quite know how to
keep it from appearing commonplace and almost sordid; but such as it was,
I must confess that it was his. He had not married his model, because he
was mainly a landscapist, perhaps; and he had not married any of his
pupils, because he had not been in love with them, charming and good and
lovely as he had thought some of them; and of late he had realized more
and more why his fancy had not turned in their direction. He perceived
that it was already fixed, and possibly had long been fixed.

He did not blink the fact that there were many disparities, and that
there would be certain disadvantages which could never be quite overcome.
The fact had been brought rather strenuously home to him by his interview
with Cynthia's father. He perceived, as indeed he had always known, that
with a certain imaginative lift in his thinking and feeling, Whitwell was
irreparably rustic, that he was and always must be practically Yankee.
Westover was not a Yankee, and he did not love or honor the type, though
its struggles against itself touched and amused him. It made him a little
sick to hear how Whitwell had profited by Durgin's necessity, and had
taken advantage of him with conscientious and self-applausive rapacity,
while he admired his prosperity, and tried to account for it by doubt of
its injustice. For a moment this seemed to him worse than Durgin's
conscientious toughness, which was the antithesis of Whitwell's
remorseless self-interest. For the moment this claimed Cynthia of its
kind, and Westover beheld her rustic and Yankee of her father's type. If
she was not that now, she would grow into that through the lapse from the
personal to the ancestral which we all undergo in the process of the
years.

The sight of her face as he had pictured it, and of the soul which he had
imagined for it, restored him to a better sense of h