Edith Wharton. The age of innocence (№ 420595)

He mentally sorted through the marriages of his friends - supposedly happy - and found none that would even remotely correspond to the picture of the passionate and tender friendship that he drew for himself, thinking about them with May. He suddenly realized that this picture, which he so dreamed of, demanded from May freedom of judgment, experience, scope of thoughts - in short, all those traits, the absence of which in her diligently brought up. He was horrified by the premonition that their marriage was doomed to become like everyone else around him, a boring union of material and public interests, which was held together, on the one hand, by hypocrisy, and on the other by ignorance.