"Oh, no, it isn't, darling. And you don't think it is either."
"Oh, if you can't talk about it sensibly, B, we'd better chuck it." He rose from the table.
She rose too and slipped her arm into his as they went into the other room, and laughed at him. "I think it's awfully sweet of you to want to make the best of it," she said. "I won't worry you any more, darling, if you're certain that nothing can stop it."
"Well, you ought to be able to see it as I do. You know what Caroline is. She wouldn't give her love, and take it away again when the sort of objections that you feel towards Maurice are pointed out to her. She's faced all that, and it doesn't matter to her. She sees a lot more in him than you can, or than I've been able to; though I tell you that there is a lot in him, and I'm quite ready to accept him. So you—and Dick—ought to make the effort too."
They were standing together before the fire, her arm still in his. Her face was graver, as she said: "Caroline is different to me. That's quite true."
"I haven't meant anything I've said to reflect on you."
"I know, darling. But you wouldn't treat it like that if it were me, all the same. Well, of course we shall be as nice about it as ever we can, and if he does turn into something that makes him more equal to Caroline it will be all the easier. It's quite beyond me to think of him as her equal now, Dad, so you mustn't expect me to do it."
"Oh, well, don't show it; that's all I ask," he said.
The view taken of the affair by Lady Grafton, whom he saw in the course of the week, was that it was his own fault for burying Caroline in the country. If he hadn't wanted her there whenever he went down to Abington she would have gone about more and met the right sort of men.
"Oh, my dear Mary!" he said. "She has been meeting what you call the right sort of men all her life. She doesn't want the life she'd lead with them. And as for saying that I've kept her down there, you know that's ridiculous. As a matter of fact it has rather worried me that she never wanted to go anywhere else, and I'd told her so."