What would Harry have said if he had heard all this
from the man who dusted his boots with his handkerchief?
Too Prudent By Half
Florence Burton thought herself the happiest girl
in the world. There nothing wanting perfection
of her bliss. She could perceive, though she
never allowed her mind to dwell upon the fact, that
her lover was superior in many respects to the men
whom her sisters had married. He was better educated,
better looking, in fact more fully a gentleman at
all points than either Scarness or any of the others.
She liked her sisters’ husbands very well, and
in former days, before Harry Clavering had come to
Stratton, she had never taught herself to think that
she, if she married, would want anything different
from that which Providence had given to them.
She had never thrown up her head, or even thrown up
her nose, and told herself that she would demand something
better than that. But not the less was she alive
to the knowledge that something better had come in
her way, and that that something better was now her
own. She was very proud of her lover, and, no
doubt, in some gently feminine way showed that she
was so as she made her way about among her friends
at Stratton. Any idea that she herself was better
educated, better looking, or more clever than her
elder sisters, and that, therefore, she was deserving
of a higher order of husband, had never entered her
mind. The Burtons in London—Theodore
Burton and his wife—who knew her well,
and who, of all the family, were best able to appreciate
her worth, had long been of opinion that she deserved
some specially favored lot in life. The question
with them would be, whether Harry Clavering was good
enough for her.
Everybody at Stratton knew that she was engaged, and
when they wished her joy she made no coy denials.
Her sisters had all been engaged in the same way,
and their marriages had gone off in regular sequence
to their engagements. There had never been any
secret with them about their affairs. On this
matter the practice is very various among different
people. There are families who think it almost
indelicate to talk about marriage as a thing actually
in prospect for any of their own community. An
ordinary acquaintance would be considered to be impertinent
in even hinting at such a thing, although the thing
were an established fact. The engaged young ladies
only whisper the news through the very depths of their
pink note-paper, and are supposed to blush as they
communicate the tidings by their pens, even in the
retirement of their own rooms. But there are
other families in which there is no vestige of such
mystery, in which an engaged couple are spoken of together
as openly as though they were already bound in some
sort of public partnership. In these families
the young ladies talk openly of their lovers, and
generally prefer that subject of conversation to any
