ll upon the fact, that her lover was
superior in many respects to the men whom her sisters had married. He
was better educated, better looking, in fact more fully a gentleman at
all points than either Scarness or any of the others. She liked her
sisters' husbands very well, and in former days, before Harry Clavering
had come to Stratton, she had never taught herself to think that she, if
she married, would want anything different from that which Providence
had given to them. She had never thrown up her head, or even thrown up
her nose, and told herself that she would demand something better than
that. But not the less was she alive to the knowledge that something
better had come in her way, and that that something better was now her
own. She was very proud of her lover, and, no doubt, in some gently
feminine way showed that she was so as she made her way about among her
friends at Stratton. Any idea that she herself was better educated,
better looking, or more clever than her elder sisters, and that,
therefore, she was deserving of a higher order of husband, had never
entered her mind. The Burtons in London--Theodore Burton and his
wife--who knew her well, and who, of all the family, were best able to
appreciate her worth, had long been of opinion that she deserved some
specially favored lot in life. The question with them would be, whether
Harry Clavering was good enough for her.

Everybody at Stratton knew that she was engaged, and when they wished
her joy she made no coy denials. Her sisters had all been engaged in the
same way, and their marriages had gone off in regular sequence to their
engagements. There had never been any secret with them about their
affairs. On this matter the practice is very various among different
people. There are families who think it almost indelicate to talk about
marriage as a thing actually in prospect for any of their own community.
An ordinary acquaintance would be considered to be impertinent in even
hinting at such a thing, although the thing were an established fact.
The engaged young ladies only whisper the news through the very depths
of their pink note-paper, and are supposed to blush as they communicate
the tidings by their pens, even in the retirement of their own rooms.
But there are other families in which there is no vestige of such
mystery, in which an engaged couple are spoken of together as openly as
though they were already bound in some sort of public partnership. In