She had given her word not to speak to any one, but maman had been ignorant of the library replete with the novelists of the day, and although she was not untruthful, _enfin_, she saw no reason to ask her too anxious parent for another prohibition and condemn herself to yawn at the sea.
Ruyler proposed at the end of a week.

She was the only really innocent, unspoiled, unselfconscious girl he had ever met, almost as old-fashioned as his great grandmother must have been.

Not that he set forth her virtues to bolster his determination to marry a girl of no family even in her own country; he was madly in love, and life without her was unthinkable; but he tabulated the thousand points to her credit for the benefit of his outraged father.
He did not pretend to like Madame Delano.

She was a hard, calculating, sordid old bourgeoisie, but when he refused the little _dot_ she would have settled upon Helene, he knew that he had won her friendship and that she would give him no trouble.

She was not a mother-in-law to be ashamed of, for her manners were coldly correct, her education in youth had evidently been adequate, and in her obese way she was imposing.