What would Harry have said if he had heard all this from the man who dusted his boots with his handkerchief?

Chapter IX

Too Prudent By Half

Florence Burton thought herself the happiest girl in the world.  There nothing wanting perfection of her bliss.  She could perceive, though she never allowed her mind to dwell upon the fact, that her lover was superior in many respects to the men whom her sisters had married.  He was better educated, better looking, in fact more fully a gentleman at all points than either Scarness or any of the others.  She liked her sisters’ husbands very well, and in former days, before Harry Clavering had come to Stratton, she had never taught herself to think that she, if she married, would want anything different from that which Providence had given to them.  She had never thrown up her head, or even thrown up her nose, and told herself that she would demand something better than that.  But not the less was she alive to the knowledge that something better had come in her way, and that that something better was now her own.  She was very proud of her lover, and, no doubt, in some gently feminine way showed that she was so as she made her way about among her friends at Stratton.  Any idea that she herself was better educated, better looking, or more clever than her elder sisters, and that, therefore, she was deserving of a higher order of husband, had never entered her mind.  The Burtons in London—­Theodore Burton and his wife—­who knew her well, and who, of all the family, were best able to appreciate her worth, had long been of opinion that she deserved some specially favored lot in life.  The question with them would be, whether Harry Clavering was good enough for her.

Everybody at Stratton knew that she was engaged, and when they wished her joy she made no coy denials.  Her sisters had all been engaged in the same way, and their marriages had gone off in regular sequence to their engagements.  There had never been any secret with them about their affairs.  On this matter the practice is very various among different people.  There are families who think it almost indelicate to talk about marriage as a thing actually in prospect for any of their own community.  An ordinary acquaintance would be considered to be impertinent in even hinting at such a thing, although the thing were an established fact.  The engaged young ladies only whisper the news through the very depths of their pink note-paper, and are supposed to blush as they communicate the tidings by their pens, even in the retirement of their own rooms.  But there are other families in which there is no vestige of such mystery, in which an engaged couple are spoken of together as openly as though they were already bound in some sort of public partnership.  In these families the young ladies talk openly of their lovers, and generally prefer that subject of conversation to any