Mrs. Mavick, according to her own assertion, was one of those who enjoy nature.  “Nature and a few friends, not too many, only those whom one trusts and who are companionable,” she had said to Lord Montague.

This young gentleman had found the pursuit of courtship in America attended by a good many incidental social luxuries.  It had been a wise policy to impress him with the charm of a society which has unlimited millions to make it attractive.  Even to an impecunious noble there is a charm in this, although the society itself has some of the lingering conditions of its money origin.  But since the great display of the ball, and the legitimate inferences drawn from it by the press and the fashionable world, Mrs. Mavick had endeavored to surround her intended son-in-law with the toils of domestic peace.

He must be made to feel at home.  And this she did.  Mrs. Mavick was as admirable in the role of a domestic woman as of a woman of the world.  The simple pleasures, the confidences, the intimacies of home life surrounded him.  His own mother, the aged duchess, could not have looked upon him with more affection, and possibly not have pampered him with so many luxuries.  There was only one thing wanting to make this home complete.  In conventional Europe the contracting parties are not the signers of the marriage contract.  In the United States the parties most interested take the initiative in making the contract.

Here lay the difficulty of the situation, a situation that puzzled Lord Montague and enraged Mrs. Mavick.  Evelyn maintained as much indifference to the domestic as to the worldly situation.  Her mother thought her lifeless and insensible; she even went so far as to call her unwomanly in her indifference to what any other woman would regard as an opportunity for a brilliant career.

Lifeless indeed she was, poor child; physically languid and scarcely able to drag herself through the daily demands upon her strength.  Her mother made it a reproach that she was so pale and unresponsive.  Apparently she did not resist, she did everything she was told to do.  She passed, indeed, hours with Lord Montague, occasions contrived when she was left alone in the house with him, and she made heroic efforts to be interested, to find something in his mind that was in sympathy with her own thoughts.  With a woman’s ready instinct she avoided committing herself to his renewed proposals, sometimes covert, sometimes direct, but the struggle tired her.  At the end of all such interviews she had to meet her mother, who, with a smile of hope and encouragement, always said, “Well, I suppose you and Lord Montague have made it up,” and then to encounter the contempt expressed for her as a “goose.”

She was helpless in such toils.  At times she felt actually abandoned of any human aid, and in moods of despondency almost resolved to give up the struggle.  In the eyes of the world it was a good match, it would make her mother happy, no doubt her father also; and was it not her duty to put aside her repugnance, and go with the current of the social and family forces that seemed irresistible?