For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:  he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the woman as he had loved some others.  He would marry her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections—­a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his name, the mother of his children.  But for love, passion, enthusiasm, sentiment—­Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.

It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself.  She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby.  When he came home for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it too.  He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him a choice in the matter.

“And what do you think of Adelaide?” asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when her son said that he had been to the rectory.  “You have seen her twice now:  what is your impression of her?’”

“She is prettier than ever—­improved, I should say, all through,” was his answer.

Mrs. Harrowby smiled.  “She is a girl I like,” she said.  “She is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things.”

“Yes,” answered Edgar, “she is thoroughly well-bred.”

“We have seen a great deal of her of late years,” Mrs. Harrowby continued, angling dexterously.  “She and the girls are fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight difference of age between them.  But Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the neighborhood.  And I think that of itself shows such good taste and nice feeling.”

“So it does,” said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide’s good taste and nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local nymphs.  To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently.  If it “ever came to anything,” it would be better that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.

“She is coming up to dinner this evening,” Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.