You see them with imperfect or unaccomplished toilets, and often with muddy boots, especially when they look after their own horses.

You begin to realize that ideals also are as much subject to the petty necessities of life as ordinary men, and do not always preserve the precise postures you are wont to see them in when their portraits adorn the picture-galleries.

With women it is quite different.

Woman is born to beautify the domestic circle, woman is always fascinating whether she be dressed up or domestically dowdy, but man is least of all fascinating at home.
In a word, Fanny felt the danger to be much less when it was actually before her than it had seemed to be when seen from afar, and she looked at Rudolf much more calmly with her bodily eyes than she had been wont to do with the eyes of her imagination.
Thus the first week which Fanny spent at Szentirmay Castle was by no means so very painful, and after that Rudolf had to go to the capital from whence he was only to return on the day before the installation.
Meanwhile the two ladies, with the utmost forethought, were arranging everything for the approaching festivities, and whatever one of them forgot was sure to occur to the other.

Fanny began to find her position more and more natural; every day she began to gain a greater command over her tender emotions, and indeed life, practical life, makes possible and comprehensible much which poetical logic and the imagination label--absurd.
On the day of the installation, Lady Szentirmay and Madame Karpathy drove over to the county town where lodgings had been provided for the former's husband as Governor-General, at the town-hall.
Szentirmay wished his installation to be conducted with as little pomp and ceremony as possible.