A smiling and successful
young woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl
with a good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely
engaged, or at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr.
Rathbone-Sanders, may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success
she does not altogether grasp the intention of her husband's
discourse. It seemed to her that he was obsessed by a
responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was
aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was
justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother
was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great harm in it
nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more
spirited young peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly
that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his
problem. She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his
Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that
she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his
work, she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking
if his work permitted it.
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