“Thank you, Millie, but I don’t deserve such honor.”

Mrs. Wheaton could not be brought to look at the situation as Roger did, and she accepted the fact of Vinton Arnold with but a grim acquiescence, which was not mollified by the young man’s manner toward her.  While meaning to be very kind and polite, he was unconsciously patronizing.  She belonged to a class with which he had never had much to do, and in his secret soul he chafed at her presence and her relations to Mildred.  While in the abstract he might say that Mildred’s associations made no difference to him, he could not in fact overcome his lifelong prejudices, and Mildred’s surroundings were not at all to his taste.  Luxury and the absence of all that was rude and coarse had become essential to him, and Mrs. Wheaton’s cockney English and homely life often gave him cold chills.

Mildred in one respect disappointed him also, for she would take no aid from him, and would in no way deviate from her retired, independent life.  “Even if my feelings and principles were not involved,” she said, “good taste requires that I conform to my circumstances.”

She would take such quiet walks with him as his strength permitted, but would visit no places of public resort.  In view of his family’s hostility to his course, Arnold did not so much regret this, and so it came about that they spent many of their evenings on the platform over the roof, with the old German astronomer, star-gazing and oblivious, not far away.

While Mildred maintained her loyalty to her old friends, and her resolute plainness and simplicity of life, she considerately recognized that it was all so foreign to her lover’s previous experience that she could not expect him to feel as she did.  Moreover, his presence renewed her old love for the refined and beautiful, and her heart, that had been so sad and preoccupied, awoke at last to the truth that she was out of her sphere—­an exile far from the world her nature craved.  Arnold seemed an inseparable part of that old world of beauty and elegance.  His every act and word brought it back, and it caused a deepening regret that he was compelled to seek her in her present situation; therefore she also began to share his ill-concealed wish that she might soon escape.  Honestly as she loved Mrs. Wheaton, and would love her for all her kindness, the good woman’s talk and ways often jarred discordantly on her nerves.  Arnold soon discovered this fact, and it made him very impatient over the prospect of life long continued under its present aspects.  He was conscious of Mrs. Wheaton’s latent hostility, and he had not the tact to conciliate her nor indeed did he make very great effort to do so.  Mildred was very sorry for this, but did not blame him greatly, for she knew her plain old friend could never be to him what she was to those who had learned her goodness and worth in emergencies that had levelled all external differences.