I
shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame
was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business
it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to
be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to
the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that
followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman
who desired to unite himself to a charming girl couldn't yet ask her to
come and live with him in sordid conditions. On the other hand it was no
possible basis of matrimony that Verena should continue for his
advantage the exercise of her remunerative profession; if he should
become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb. In the midst
of this an irrepressible desire urged him on to taste, for once, deeply,
all that he was condemned to lose, or at any rate forbidden to attempt
to gain. To spend a day with her and not to see her again--that
presented itself to him at once as the least and the most that was
possible.
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