“People don’t pay anything for home work.  You must see what I mean, Arthur.”

“Yes, I see,” he replied tenderly; but after a moment’s thought, he went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking had all been done for him before he was born.  “I wish, though, that you would try to hold out a little longer, working at home with your mother.  In a year or two we shall be able to marry.”

“I couldn’t,” said Gabriella, shaking her head.  “Don’t urge me, Arthur.”

“If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry now,” he pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.

“But it wouldn’t be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take mother and Jane and the children?  No, I’ve thought it all out, dear, and I must go to work.”

“But I’ll work for them, Gabriella.  I’ll do anything on earth rather than see you ordered about by old Brandywine.”

“He won’t order me about,” answered Gabriella cheerfully; “but mother feels just as you do.  She says I am going out of my class because I won’t stay at home and work buttonholes.”

“You couldn’t go out of your class,” replied Arthur, with an instinctive gallantry which even his distress could not overcome; “but I can’t get used to the thought of it, darling—­I simply can’t.  You’re so sacred to me.  There’s something about the woman a man loves that’s different from every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens me.  I always think of you as apart from the workaday world.  I always think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle—­” Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.

As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation was becoming intolerable—­that it was an affront not only to his ideal of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as “Southern.”  His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a “lady” that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her sex.  By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.

“I know, I know,” said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.  Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she had become suspicious of any language that sounded “flowery” to her sensitive ears.  With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well that by no stretch of mind or metaphor