"Handsome, you say?"
"Very."
"Like Lady Alice? I remember her; a willowy, shadowy creature, with a sort of ethereal loveliness which appealed very strongly to my imagination when I was a boy."
Mrs. Romaine flushed a little. It occurred to her that she had never been called shadowy or ethereal-looking.
"She is much more substantial than Lady Alice," she said, drily. "I should say that she had more individuality about her. She looks to me like a girl of character and intellect."
"In which case your task will be the more difficult, you mean?"
"I don't know what you mean by a task. I have not set myself to do anything definite."
"No? Then you are very unlike your sex, Rosalind. I generally find women much too definite—damnably so."
"Well, then, I must be an exception. You are always trying to entrap me into damaging admissions, Oliver, and I won't put up with it. All that I want is to be sure that Lady Alice shall not return to her husband. But there is nothing definite in that."
"Oh, nothing at all," said Oliver, satirically. "All that you have got to do is to prejudice father and daughter against each other as much as possible, make Brooke believe that the girl has been set against him by her mother, and persuade Miss Brooke that her father is not the sort of man that Lady Alice can return to. Nothing definite in that, is there?"