Coming Home by Edith Wharton — Read

The day before we started for Rechamp his spirits flew up again, and that night he became confidential. "You've been such a friend to me that there are certain things -- seeing what's ahead of us -- that I should like to explain"; and, noticing my surprise, he went on: "I mean about my people. The state of mind in my _milieu_ must be so remote from anything you're used to in your happy country. But perhaps I can make you understand."

I saw that what he wanted was to talk to me of the girl he was engaged to. Mlle. Malo, left an orphan at ten, had been the ward of a neighbour of the Rechamps', a chap with an old name and a starred chateau, who had lost almost everything else at baccarat before he was forty, and had repented, had the gout and studied agriculture for the rest of his life. The girl's father was a rather brilliant painter, who died young, and her mother, who followed him in a year or two, was a Pole: you may fancy that, with such antecedents, the girl was just the mixture to shake down quietly into French country life with a gouty and repentant guardian. The Marquis de Corvenaire -- that was his name -- brought her down to his place, got an old maid sister to come and stay, and really, as far as one knows, brought his ward up rather decently.