"I hope so,—sooner or later."
"There's a quarrel or something;—isn't there? She's the Duke's first cousin, and we should be so sorry that things shouldn't go pleasantly with her. And she's a very good-looking girl, too. Would she like to come down to Matching?"
"She has some idea of going back to Italy."
"And leaving her lover behind her! Oh, dear, that will be very bad. She'd much better come to Matching, and then I'd ask the man to come too. Mr. Maud, isn't he?"
"Gerard Maule."
"Ah, yes; Maule. If it's the kind of thing that ought to be, I'd manage it in a week. If you get a young man down into a country house, and there has been anything at all between them, I don't see how he is to escape. Isn't there some trouble about money?"
"They wouldn't be very rich, Duchess."
"What a blessing for them! But then, perhaps, they'd be very poor."
"They would be rather poor."
"Which is not a blessing. Isn't there some proverb about going safely in the middle? I'm sure it's true about money,—only perhaps you ought to be put a little beyond the middle. I don't know why Plantagenet shouldn't do something for her."