He allowed that a certain number of women must of necessity
be abandoned, and raised no objection to that; but what he did consider
intolerable was that any one woman should make a stand against the
degradation of her own sex. He thought that immoral.
He was well enough to live with, however, this obstinate English country
gentleman, although without sympathetic insight, and liable to become a
petty domestic tyrant at any moment. "Sound" was what he would have called
himself. And he was a man to be envied upon the whole, for his family
loved him, and his friends knew no ill of him.
CHAPTER II.
Evadne, like the Vicar of Wakefield, was by nature a lover of happy human
faces, and she could be playful herself on occasion; but she had little if
any of the saving sense of humor.
Her habit was to take everything _au grand serieux_, and to consider
it. When other people were laughing she would be gravely observant, as if
she were solving a problem; and she would sooner have thought of trying to
discover what combination of molecules resulted in a joke, with a view to
benefiting her species by teaching them how to produce jokes at will, than
of trying to be witty herself.
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