She had been placed for her education, fourteen years before, in a Parisian convent, by a widowed mammma who was fonder of Homburg and Nice than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing daughter. Here, besides various elegant accomplishments—the art of wearing a train, of composing a bouquet¹, of presenting a cup of tea—she acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for a sign of precocious² worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a man of hierarchical “rank”—not for the pleasure of hearing herself called Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never greatly care, but because she had a romantic belief that the enjoyment³ of inherited and transmitted consideration, consideration attached to the fact of birth, would be the direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy⁴ of feeling. She supposed it would be found that the state of being noble does actually enforce the famous obligation. Romances are rarely worked out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia’s excuse was the prime purity of her moral vision. She was essentially⁵ incorruptible, and she took this pernicious conceit⁶ to her bosom⁷ very much as if it had been a dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables⁸, when they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in well-attested but sordid¹⁰ facts. She believed that a gentleman with a long pedigree must be of necessity a very fine fellow, and enjoyment of a chance to carry further a family chronicle begun ever so far back must be, as a consciousness, a source of the most beautiful impulses. It wasn’t therefore only that noblesse oblige, she thought, as regards yourself, but that it ensures as nothing else does in respect to your wife. She had never, at the start, spoken to a nobleman in her life, and these convictions were but a matter of

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