, but with real care
and vision for their half-hidden pains and mortifications, with long ruminating
enjoyment of little pleasures prepared for them? Perhaps the emphasis of his
admiration did not fall precisely on this rarest quality in her - perhaps he
approved his own choice of her chiefly because she did not strike him as a
remarkable rarity. A man likes his wife to be pretty: well, Lucy was pretty, but
not to a maddening extent. A man likes his wife to be accomplished, gentle,
affectionate, and not stupid; and Lucy had all these qualifications. Stephen was
not surprised to find himself in love with her, and was conscious of excellent
judgment in preferring her to Miss Leyburn, the daughter of the county member,
although Lucy was only the daughter of his father's subordinate partner;
besides, he had had to defy and overcome a slight unwillingness and
disappointment in his father and sisters - a circumstance which gives a young
man an agreeable consciousness of his own dignity. Stephen was aware that he had
sense and independence enough to choose the wife who was likely to make him
happy, unbiassed by any indirect considerations. He meant to choose Lucy: she
was a little darling, and exactly the sort of woman he had always most admired.
 

                                   Chapter II

                               First Impressions

»He is very clever, Maggie,« said Lucy. She was kneeling on a footstool at
Maggie's feet, after placing that dark lady in the large crimson-velvet chair.
»I feel sure you will like him. I hope you will.«
    »I shall be very difficult to please,« said Maggie, smiling, and holding up
one of Lucy's long curls, that the sunlight might shine through it. »A gentleman
who thinks he is good enough for Lucy must expect to be sharply criticised.«
    »Indeed, he's a great deal too good for me. And sometimes, when he is away,
I almost think it can't really be that he loves me. But I can never doubt it
when he is with me - though I couldn't bear any one but you to know that I feel
in that way, Maggie.«
    »Oh, then, if I disapprove of him you can give him up, since you are not
engaged,« said Maggie, with playful gravity.
    »I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think
of being married soon,« said Lucy, too thoroughly preoccupied to notice Maggie's
joke; »and I should like everything to go on for a long
