Chapter 6 - Page 2

reviewed his friends' marriages--
the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that
answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender
comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation
with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture
presupposed, on her part, the experience, the
versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had
been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver
of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most
of the other marriages about him were: a dull association
of material and social interests held together by
ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who
had most completely realised this enviable ideal. As
became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife
so completely to his own convenience that, in the most
conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with
other men's wives, she went about in smiling
unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence was so frightfully
strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly, and
avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence
to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as became a "foreigner"
of doubtful origin) had what was known in
New York as "another establishment."

Archer tried to console himself with the thought that
he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May
such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference
was after all one of intelligence and not of standards.
In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world,
where the real thing was never said or done or even
thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary
signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why
Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's
engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed
expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate
reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced,
quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of
advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage
bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

The result, of course, was that the young girl who
was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification
remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness
and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because
she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew
of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no
better preparation than this, she was to be plunged
overnight into what people evasively called "the facts
of life."

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.
He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed,
in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness
at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas