"Yes, Miss Daphne, if you would come out to New York you'd have a real good time. You'd turn all the young fellow's heads. I'm afraid you'd do a terrible amount of damage there. I should like to show you and Mrs. Wyburn Newport in the season, too. You ladies have it all your own way over the other side of——may I say, the herringpond?"
"Oh, please do; yes, do say the herringpond!"
Daphne leant forward and said to Harry:
"Do you know who is that very distinguished-looking man who has just come in—rather weary and a little grey on the temples? He bowed and kissed the woman's hand so charmingly—at the next table to us. Looks like a great diplomatist."
"Then he must be a stockbroker," said Valentia decidedly. "Every one with the grand manner always is."
"Really! I can't say; I don't know any stockbrokers," said Miss Luscombe.
"How distinguished that sounds!" murmured Vaughan.
"It's very clever of you, Miss Luscombe," said Lady Walmer; "I don't see how you can help it! I know nobody else. I always tell Alec she'll have to marry one, and when she says she doesn't want to, 'My dear child,' I say, 'you can't marry people you don't see!' And almost the only people she ever sees at our house are stockbrokers—except a few soldiers who never have a penny."
Alec was the daughter, named after her distinguished godmother.
"It's quite gone out to be snobbish now," Lady Walmer continued in a lower voice to Harry. "We're all only too glad to take all we can get in exchange for anything we give!"