"Not much," she smiled.
"I wonder," speculated Mr. Frantz, eying her curiously, "if there was ever a married pair whose ideal of each other grew higher after marriage. Think so?"
"Surely. Their lives being a daily unfolding of new beauties and excellences to each other."
"Oh, but I'm afraid you're a sentimentalist."
"Southerners generally are, but they're saved, you know, by their unfailing sense of humour," she responded, turning from him to give some attention to the man seated on the other side of her at the little supper table.
Mrs. Leitzel's adroitness in avoiding thin ice was the despair of the gossips of New Munich.
XVIII
Margaret's radiant happiness in the discovery she made on the very day after the party, that she was embarked on the wonderful passage to motherhood, fraught with its strangely mingled suffering and bliss, was somewhat tempered by the consciousness that the coming child would have to be a Leitzel; there was no escaping that catastrophe. She tried to persuade herself that the Leitzel characteristics, if properly educated, might not be so very lamentable; but her deep-down conviction that her child ran the risk of inheriting a small, mean soul gave her no little anxiety and self-reproach.
"My penalty for trying to compromise with life's austerities!" she grimly told herself with sad misgiving.