Will you sacrifice your
happiness and mine to your pride?"
"Proud perhaps I am, but it is not all pride. I think you are noble,
but I think also you could not help losing patience when you found that
I could not accommodate myself to the station to which you had raised
me. Then you would not respect me. I am, indeed, too proud to wish to
lose that; and losing your respect, as I said before, I should not long
keep your love."
"But you will accommodate yourself to any station. My dear, you are
young, and know so little about this world, which is such a bugbear to
you. Why, there is very little that will be greatly unlike this. At
first you might be a little bewildered, but I shall be by you all the
time, and you shall feel and fear nothing, and gradually you will learn
what little you need to know; and most of all, you will know yourself
the best and the loveliest of women. Dear Ivy, I would not part with
your sweet, unconscious simplicity for all the accomplishments and
acquired elegancies of the finest lady in the world." (That's what men
always say.) "You are not ignorant of anything you ought to know, and
your ignorance of the world is an additional charm to one who knows so
much of its wickedness as I.
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