"I suppose so;—but that consideration has had no weight with me. I have always regarded myself as the architect of my own fortune, and have no wish to owe my material comfort to a wife."
"Sheer love!" suggested the Duchess.
"Yes, I think so. It's very ridiculous; is it not?"
"And why does the rich barrister object?"
"The rich barrister, Duchess, is an out and out old Tory, who thinks that his daughter ought to marry no one but an English Tory. I am not exactly that."
"A man does not hamper his daughter in these days by politics, when she is falling in love."
"There are other cognate reasons. He does not like a foreigner. Now I am an Englishman, but I have a foreign name. He does not think that a name so grandly Saxon as Wharton should be changed to one so meanly Latin as Lopez."
"The lady does not object to the Latinity?"
"I fancy not."
"Or to the bearer of it?"