after thirty years of married happiness, he could still remind himself that victoria was endowed with every charm except the thrilling touch of human frailty.
though her perfection discouraged pleasures, especially the pleasures of love, he had learned in time to feel the pride of a husband in her natural frigidity. for he still clung, amid the decay of moral platitudes, to the discredited ideal of chivalry. in his youth the world was suffused with the after-glow of the long victorian age, and a graceful feminine style had softened the manners, if not the natures, of men.
at the end of that interesting epoch, when womanhood was exalted from a biological fact into a miraculous power, virginius littlepage, the younger son of an old and affluent family, had married victoria brooke, the grand-daughter of a tobacco planter, who had made a satisfactory fortune by forsaking his plantation and converting tobacco into cigarettes. while virginius had been trained by stern tradition to respect every woman who had not stooped to folly, the virtue peculiar to her sex was among the least of his reasons for admiring victoria. she was not only modest, which was usual in the neties, but she was beautiful, which is unusual in any decade.
in the beginning of their acquaintance he had gone even further and ascribed intellect to her; but a few months of marriage had shown this to be merely one of the many delusions created by perfect features and noble expression. everything about her had been smooth and definite, even the tones of her voice and the way her light brown hair, which she wore ?la pompadour, was rolled stiffly back from her forehead and coiled in a burnished rope on the top of her head. a serious young man, ambitious to attain a place in the world