And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.
In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently.
Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment.

Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.
But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English _cadre_ and the English life.

He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house.
For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the house--young, graceful, noble--moving about below them.

And even--for the first time--there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son, and he did not recoil.

He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange complacency.