Soon after that Hetta Houghton reverted to the all important subject.
"You have found out that what I told you was true, Lady George."
"Oh yes,—all true."
"I wonder what the Dowager thinks about it."
"My husband is with his mother. She thinks, I suppose, just what we all think, that it would have been better if he had told everybody of his marriage sooner."
"A great deal better."
"I don't know whether, after all, it will make a great deal of difference. Lady Brotherton,—the Dowager I mean,—is so thoroughly English in all her ways that she never could have got on very well with an Italian daughter-in-law."
"The question is whether when a man springs a wife and family on his relations in that way, everything can be taken for granted. Suppose a man had been ever so many years in Kamptschatka, and had then come back with a Kamptschatkean female, calling her his wife, would everybody take it as all gospel?"
"I suppose so."
"Do you? I think not. In the first place it might be difficult for an Englishman to get himself married in that country according to