When I have added that he hated to see women eager and
argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the
inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched
a state of mind which will doubtless strike many readers as painfully
crude. It had prevented Basil Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots
on his _i_'s, as the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs.
Luna was making love to him. The process went on a long time before he
became aware of it. He had perceived very soon that she was a
tremendously familiar little woman--that she took, more rapidly than he
had ever known, a high degree of intimacy for granted. But as she had
seemed to him neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not
easily have represented to himself why she should take it into her head
to marry (it would never have occurred to him to doubt that she wanted
marriage) an obscure and penniless Mississippian, with womenkind of his
own to provide for. He could not guess that he answered to a certain
secret ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even when
landless, who adored a Southerner under any circumstances, who thought
her kinsman a fine, manly, melancholy, disinterested type, and who was
sure that her views of public matters, the questions of the age, the
vulgar character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response in
his mind.
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