Mrs. Bonfill made concessions to this point of view.
'Let us hope it will be so, my dear. I think myself that your faults have been mainly of taste.'
'At any rate I'm not silly,' she protested to Mervyn. 'You mayn't like the man, but he knows his business.'
'I certainly hope you won't have to add pecuniary loss to the other disagreeable features of the affair,' said Mervyn; and a few minutes later, apparently as an afterthought, he asked her carelessly how much she would make on the best hypothesis. Trix named a moderate figure but a substantial one.
'And I suppose the rogue'll make twice as much himself!' There was reluctant envy in Mervyn's tone. It gave Trix courage. Could she brandish winnings in their faces, she felt sure that the lecturers would be less severe and she less helpless before them.
Meanwhile, with the impulse to make a friend among her gaolers, with her woman's instinct for the likeliest, she was all dutifulness and affection towards Barmouth. She made way with him. The success helped her a little, but less than it would have because of his reverence for his son.
'How such an affectionate well-mannered young woman could be led so far astray is inexplicable to me—inexplicable,' he observed to Mrs. Bonfill.
Mrs. Bonfill endorsed his bewilderment with a helpless wave of her hand.
'There is good in her,' he announced. 'She will respond to Mortimer's influence.' And the good gentleman began to make things a little easier for Trix within the narrow sphere of his ability. Nobody, of course, had ever told him that the sphere was narrow, and he had not discovered it; his small semi-surreptitious indulgences were bestowed with a princely flourish.
Lady Barmouth was inexorable; she was Mervyn's outraged mother. She had, moreover, the acuteness to discern one of the ideas that lay in Trix's mind and stiffened it to endurance.