Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice proclaimed them sacrosanct. We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the symbol.