“I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense—­or somebody,” said Mrs. Pasmer.  “Do you know what talk this will make?”

“I don’t care for the talk.  It would be worse than talk to marry a man whom I couldn’t trust—­who wanted to please me so much that he had to deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth.”

“You headstrong girl!” said her mother impartially, admiring at the same time the girl’s haughty beauty.

There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer’s mind which perhaps none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from every worldly point of view.  She could only ask, “If you break this engagement, what do you expect to do?”

“The engagement is broken.  I shall go into a sisterhood.”

“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer.  “I will have no such nonsense.  Don’t flatter yourself that I will.  Even if I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it.  You’re always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I’ve never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort even, in the slightest degree.  And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as temporising and circuitous”—­the word came to her from her talk with him—­“would be twice too good for you.  I’m going to breakfast.”

XLIV.

The difficulty in life is to bring experience to the level of expectation, to match our real emotions in view of any great occasion with the ideal emotions which we have taught ourselves that we ought to feel.  This is all the truer when the occasion is tragical:  we surprise ourselves in a helplessness to which the great event, death, ruin, lost love, reveals itself slowly, and at first wears the aspect of an unbroken continuance of what has been, or at most of another incident in the habitual sequence.

Dan Mavering came out into the bright winter morning knowing that his engagement was broken, but feeling it so little that he could not believe it.  He failed to realise it, to seize it for a fact, and he could not let it remain that dumb and formless wretchedness, without proportion or dimensions, which it now seemed to be, weighing his life down.  To verify it, to begin to outlive it, he must instantly impart it, he must tell it, he must see it with others’ eyes.  This was the necessity of his youth and of his sympathy, which included himself as well as the rest of the race in its activity.  He had the usual environment of a young man who has money.  He belonged to clubs, and he had a large acquaintance among men of his own age, who lived a life of greater leisure; or were more absorbed in business, but whom he met constantly in society.  For one reason or