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room. "I should probably wonder if you'd find it enough. I daresay you've heard greatly exaggerated amounts. Pa says people always think one is poorer or richer than one is."
    He gaped. "You wouldn't
mind
being married for your money?"
    "I certainly would if that were my suitor's only consideration. But if it were merely another item in the inventory of my charms, I would have to accept it in almost any man who wanted to marry me. At least here in Boston. And from what I've heard about New York, it's not a city devoid of material concerns. Even a millionaire might covet my dowry. He might see it as a guarantee that
he
wasn't being married for his money."
    "You are certainly a very practical woman," he muttered.
    "But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't want virtues to balance the material factor. As Macduff says of Malcolm's asserted vices: 'All these are portable, with other graces weighed.'"
    Ambrose picked up the quotation with a fierce delight. '"But I have none!'" he cried. "'Nay, had I power I should pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, uproar the universal peace, confound all unity on earth!'"
    "Well, we're both Shakespeare lovers anyway," she said, rising to help him turn off the last lamps. "And that in itself might be almost enough. But I warn you, Ambrose. If you think you can turn me off with the list of your imagined faults, I'm not taken in. Like Hamlet, I know a hawk from a handsaw."
    The next days were deeply troubling ones for Ambrose. It was perfectly clear now that Hetty was ready to receive and willing to accept his proposal of marriage, that she had carefully weighed him in a mind not liable to deception and had come to the conclusion that he was worthy of the strong affection he had aroused. It was also clear to him that she did not regard him as in any way obligated to make such a proposal and that she deemed his conduct, far from seductive, to have been strictly that of a gentleman, a guest in her father's house and an agreeable friend. If he chose to leave their relationship at that, there would be no recriminations, no tears or fuss, no unseemly expressions of disappointment. The little woman was a lady, and a great lady at that.
    A signal point in her favor was that she would require no false or hypocritical avowals of eternal passion. She would take him just as he was, a man who wanted a wife because a wife and children were what every sensible male should want, and a wife whose grace, decorum, social position and, yes, even money would smooth his progress to the success to which he naturally aspired and which he certainly deserved. To the world she would be the perfect spouse, and in private the perfect mate for a man of his doubts, depressions and soaring ambition. And he for her? Well, wasn't that
her
lookout? And wasn't she admirably equipped to look out for herself? Was knowing that love was more on one side than the other really taking advantage of her? Wasn't it almost always the case?

    S OMEWHAT TO HIS SURPRISE Hetty went along with her parents' desire for a large wedding reception in their big shingle beach house in Nahant. Some three hundred of Boston's best gathered in the big tent erected on the lawn; it was a dressy and festive occasion. Ambrose's parents were delighted with the whole affair; they certainly thought that their younger son had done a great deal better than anyone could have expected from his youth. And Ambrose finally decided that they were right.

3
    W HEN A YOUNG MAN is furnished with the right job to fit his talents and ambition and the right wife for his social and domestic needs, his advance in the world, barring the absence of Lady Luck, should be smooth and steady, and such was the case with Ambrose. Even America's entry into the war in 1917 favored him, for as an army first lieutenant he was not sent to the trenches, as he had requested, but assigned instead to the war secretary's office in Washington, where his business experience enabled him to serve