Should She Have Left Him? — page 144: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

138 SHOULD SHE HAVE LEFT HIM? ple, learning all there was to be learned, condemned their position, at least the charge of forcing them- selves upon society in its ignorance of those rela- tions could not be maintained against them. By this course also Dorothy could be preserved from slights and humiliations. Fully persuaded as he was as to the wisdom of this course, yet he shrank from telling his doubts and fears to Dorothy in the high tide of her happiness. But the time for the Hilda-Waldemar wedding approached. During the weeks preceding the wed- ding, after the Courtenay family had returned from Newport, the Trescottes had frequently dined at Dorothy’s old home, and the various members of her family had been frequent visitors at her table. To all this Trescotte had submitted without protest, although he had been worried over sitting at the table with Waldemar. It was not because he was in any doubt as to the moral standard of Waldemar. He knew only too well that that easy-going young gentleman had dined at many tables the female grace of which was a purchasable quantity, and often had had the hardihood to leave his own drag at the races to converse over carriage doors with beauties more notorious for the publicity of their lives than the circumspection of them. But he also knew the peculiar code governing young men of the Walde- mar breed, and that they not only demanded from their wives the most spotless escutcheon, but the same from all of the female persuasion who belonged tothem. The possible cloud upon the Trescotte Comicboolkk<s C@