“In time! Yes, when I have grown prematurely old and gray,” said Doris, with a vexed smile. “I never understood what hard work it is, this being rich.”
“I am afraid we shouldn’t like it if we were very poor. I wonder”—she paused a moment, then went on—“I wonder how a certain marquis likes poverty?”
Doris bent lower over her blundering and utterly futile arithmetic. “I don’t know,” she said, stiffly.
Lady Despard smiled. “Any one would know you were a Stoyle by your pride, my dear,” she remarked.
Doris looked up with affected indignation.
“Pride! I am the meekest and humblest——”
“Of empresses,” put in Lady Despard. “My dear girl, you may not know it, but you are as proud a minx as ever lived, and the most unforgiving.”
Doris looked over her shoulder for a moment, then turned her head away.
“I think you are unjust,” she said, in a low voice.
“Oh, no, I’m not. For instance, here are you suddenly become possessed of a grand title, large estates, and heaps of money. The title you can’t help taking, if people choose to call you by it, and the money. Well, you take as little of that as possible; but not once have you set your foot in any one of the houses that are yours, or upon a spot of the many acres which your father left you. That’s pride, though of course you’ll say it isn’t.”