"You're most kind, Ashley, always, but I don't think there's anything we need trouble you about for the present. We don't expect any immediate change in father."
"When I said I wouldn't have anything to do with the business, I didn't include Kensington Palace Gardens in the word."
"Oh, I know you didn't. Indeed I'll ask you for help when I want it."
He was silent for a moment or two. Then he said, "You agreed with me about the business. Do you still think I was right?"
"I'm more than ever sure of it," she answered with a direct gaze at him. "I grow surer of it every day. It wasn't the least suited to you; nor you to it, you know." She smiled as she spoke the last words.
"And Jewett's in his element?"
"I hear he's wonderfully able, and he's very nice and considerate about everything too. Oh, no, you'd never have done for it."
What she said was what she had always said; she had always been against his selling the ribbons, had thought that he was too good to sell ribbons and loved him for this very thing. But the same words may carry most different implications; was not the idea in her head now that, if it would not have been good for him to sell the ribbons, neither would it have been good for the ribbons nor for the family whose prosperity depended on them? Her smile had been indulgent rather than admiring; he accused her of reverting to the commercial view of life and of suffering a revival of the family prejudices and of the instinct for getting and reverencing wealth. He felt further from her and detected a corresponding feeling in her. He studied her in the light of that unreasonable resentment with which Bertie Jewett inspired him; he saw that she read him in the light of her judgment of Ora Pinsent; and he knew tolerably well what she thought and said of Ora Pinsent. They were further apart. Yet at the end old kindliness revived and he clasped her hand very heartily.
"I'm always at your orders," he said. "Always."