Page:Caroline Lockhart--The full of the Moon.djvu/155

 She must either break with her family and marry him in spite of their opposition, or she must give him up entirely and return to the life from which she had fled.

She could not ask Ben to share it, that was certain. The idea filled her with dismay, and she was further perturbed to discover that her dismay arose chiefly from the thought of Ben's unfitness for such surroundings.

She squirmed mentally, to use a figure, at the picture of Ben running the gantlet of her argus-eyed family and his foregone failure to come within even hailing distance of their standards of culture and good breeding.

They would consider him, she winced as she admitted it, a kind of picturesque lout. They could never make allowances as she did for his mental limitations, for his crude ideas and expression of them, and sometimes, yes, sometimes for his raw selfishness and vanity.

No, he belonged here, in his own setting. To transplant him was out of the question; she never would subject him to their criticism. She could adapt herself to his life, she thought, but he could never become a part of, or at home in, the world to which she belonged.