Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of the Very Reverend
the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of dances given
chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred
in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had
no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have
done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the
effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the _tour
de force_. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has
the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of
jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider.
Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being
impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my
temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her
husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in
passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he
died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in
Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to
its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide
roving, and its picturesque personal associations.
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