When one of us loves, he questions the worth of the object of
his passion. That established, nothing else is of great importance.
There is a grand and noble quality in this, but it misses much. About
the other state of affairs--wherein the woman's appurtenances of all
kinds, as well as the woman herself, are significant--is a delicate and
subtle aura of the higher refinement--the long refinement of the spirit
through many generations--which, to an eye accustomed to look for
gradations of moral beauty, possesses a peach-blow iridescence of its
own. From one point of view, the old-fashioned forms of thought and
courtesy are stilted and useless. From another they retain still the
lofty dignity of _noblesse oblige_.
So we would have none set down Bennington de Laney as a prig or a snob
because he did not at once decide for his heart as against his
aristocratic instincts. Not only all his early education, but the life
lessons of many generations of ancestors had taught him to set a
fictitious value on social position. He was a de Laney on both sides.
He had never been allowed to forget it. A long line of forefathers,
proud-eyed in their gilded frames, mutely gazed their sense of the
obligations they had bequeathed to this last representative of their
race.
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