Towards democracy

404 Towards Democracy

Wild as a raven, and a free lover of Nature, is the Irish squire’s daughter. She hates all the conventions and pro |

prieties with an instinctive hatred—she hardly knows why. She is loyed by a man whom the family consider beneath them. He is not without his faults certainly. But when her

parents turn fiercely on her and him, she determines at all costs to stick to him. Her sister, the dove, approved and | admired by everybody,-marries a young Earl just come into —

the title; and she on the same day goes off with her friend, and is forbidden to cross, and in fact never crosses, the threshold of her home again.

The newly-made wife, wedded to an army officer, finds |

almost immediately after marriage that their temperaments are

wholly incompatible. Instead of sacrificing herself to ‘duty’ -

or propriety, she has the good sense to insist on leaving him : on leaving him his freedom, and herself the same, as far as may be, for the future.

And this is of a young man, a man about town and the clubs, and well up in the finesse of society, but of real affectionate nature—who was truly bored with his own pursuits and surroundings, and so for him too the barriers vanished.

He fell in with a girl of quite rustic birth and life, but

bnght-looking, and of sturdy almost stubborn common-sense

and wit; and was charmed—partly by her contrast to all that he was accustomed to.

Ultimately—and after some obstinate and exasperating refusals on her part—he made her his wife; much to the

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