"I'm not a woman to exaggerate, dearest. All the Lovelands have been good-looking. One has only to go into the picture gallery at the Castle to see that——"
"Yes. As we can't sell their portraits."
"If we could, your father would have done it when he sold the Town house. But you will be so confusing, Val. My argument is, that as you're the best looking and the cleverest——"
"I don't know a blessed thing, my dear ladyship. Never had any education. You ought to have sent me to Eton, instead of coddling me up with tutors and——"
"You didn't think so then. I remember well when it was proposed, you flung yourself on the floor and howled."
"So of course that settled it."
"Why, yes. You generally settled things like that. You had such a determined way, dear. But you were born knowing more than many studious, uninteresting young men have forgotten. Then, your South African career! It was like a romance. You, who had been crammed, oh, ever so little, for Sandhurst, and then left there to go to the war when you were a mere child, hardly nineteen—so brave! And then, the Thing you did on the battlefield! Of course you ought to have had the Victoria Cross, but as it was, the newspapers rang with your praises, and I was besieged for your photographs to publish. That deed alone would have made you a personage of consideration, even without your rank."
"I've told you lots of times, Mater, the whole thing was a sort of accident. I couldn't bear the chap. If I'd stopped to think, I don't believe I'd have run back a step to drag him out from under fire. But I was there, hauling him away, before I knew what I was doing."
"Yes, you have told me—and other people. But no one believes you. How could they? They see it's your modesty." (Lord Loveland's mother was perhaps the one person on earth who would have attributed to him this quality.) "And as for disliking the young man whose life you saved at the risk of your own, of course that proves you all the more noble. Everybody must see that."
"Oh, well, it's a jolly good thing for me if they do," said Val, mechanically passing his hand over the scar on his forehead, which became him like a hall mark or a halo. It, together with the South African brown that never quite faded, had made him still more ornamental in the eyes of the pretty young married women with whom he was popular. Also in the eyes of girls, who liked to dance and flirt with Lord Loveland, even though they preferred to marry Dukes and Princes. "But what are you working up to so elaborately, Mater?"