It was from his mother and covered a number of closely-written pages.  As he was about to thrust it back into his pocket a single sentence caught his eye.  It read:  “Sally Ogletree gave a supper last week, which was a very pretty affair.”

He stopped short on the trail, and the world seemed to go black around him.  He almost fell.  Then resumed his way, but step now was hesitating and slow, and he walked with his eyes bent thoughtfully on the ground.

CHAPTER XVII

NOBLESSE OBLIGE

The thought which caused Bennington de Lane so suddenly look grave was suggested by the sentence in his mother’s letter.  For the first time he realized that these people, up to now so amusing, were possibly destined to come into intimate relations with himself.  Old Bill Lawton was Mary’s father; while Mrs. Lawton was Mary’s mother; Maude was Mary’s sister.

The next instant a great rush of love into his heart drove this feeling from it.  What matter anything, provided she loved him and he loved her?  Generous sentiment so filled him that there was room for nothing else.  He even experienced dimly in the depths of his consciousness, a faint pale joy that in thus accepting what was disagreeable to his finer sensibilities, he was proving more truly to his own self the boundlessness of his love.  For the moment he was exalted by this instant revulsion against anything calculating in his passion.  And then slowly, one by one, the objections stole back, like a flock of noisome sombre creatures put to flight by a sudden movement, but now returning to their old nesting places.  The very unassuming method of their recurrence lent them an added influence.  Almost before Bennington knew it they had established a case, and he found himself face to face with a very ugly problem.

Perhaps it will be a little difficult for the average and democratic reader to realize fully the terrible proportions of this problem.  We whose lives assume little, require little of them.  Intangible objections to the desires of our hearts do not count for much against their realization; there needs the rough attrition of reality to turn back our calm, complacent acquisition of that which we see to be for our best interest in the emotional world.  Claims of ancestry mean nothing.  Claims of society mean not much more.  Claims of wealth are considered as evanescent among a class of men who, by their efforts and genius, are able to render absolute wealth itself an evanescent quality.  When one of us loves, he questions the worth of the object of his passion.  That established, nothing else is of great importance.  There is a grand and noble quality in this, but it misses much.  About the other state of affairs—­wherein the woman’s appurtenances of all kinds, as well as the woman herself, are significant—­is a delicate and subtle aura of the higher refinement—­the long refinement of the spirit through many generations—­which, to an eye accustomed to look for gradations of moral beauty, possesses a peach-blow iridescence of its own.  From one point of view, the old-fashioned forms of thought and courtesy are stilted and useless.  From another they retain still the lofty dignity of noblesse oblige.