Maud laughed; she was one of those people whom temper in others leaves perfectly undisturbed. Then she laid her hand on her mother's.
"Dearest mother," she said, "I really did not mean to be tiresome. Was I? You were saying that he was well-conducted, clever and wealthy."
"I should have thought that was a good deal to say for any one," said her mother, not yet quite calm. "There are heaps of perfectly well-conducted people in the world who are fools, heaps of very wealthy people who are vicious, and plenty, as I said, who have neither wits, morals, nor money. Which sort do you want? Or do you look forward to spinsterhood in a cottage with a canary? Almost all your father's fortune will go to Otho and Reginald. You will be quite poor."
"I don't love Anthony Maxwell," said Maud, with a deplorable relapse into directness.
"Oh, my dear, have you been reading some sentimental novel? You seem to think that every girl meets the man eternally pre-destined for her, with clear-cut features and a coiffure like a hair-dresser's. That sort of romantic stuff is extinct. It never existed in fact, and it is rapidly disappearing in fiction. If it were true, the world would have come to an end long ago, for we should all have caught such frightful colds by reading Dante and Shakespeare on violet-covered banks that we should have died without children."
Mrs. Brereton settled herself on the cushions of the carriage, feeling much more comfortable. If only Maud would continue to argue the question, she felt sure of her ground.
"You are not silly, I know, dear," she went on; "in fact, I think you are too much the other way. You like analyzing and picking things to bits, and saying, 'This seems to me faulty here, and that seems to me exaggerated there.' I assure you it is a mistake. And when you say you do not love him, you are using expressions of the meaning of which you have no idea. You don't know what love is—no girl can. You may feel attracted to a handsome face as you can be attracted by a landscape or a piece of jewellery, but no one with the slightest sense of refinement could marry a man because he was handsome. It is a grossly indelicate idea, and one I am sure which you never entertained."
"I was not proposing to marry any man because of his good looks," said Maud.
"No, dear, I am certain you were not; and I was only saying in the abstract that to do such a thing would be an inconceivable folly. If your husband was Adonis himself, you would forget he was even passably good-looking in a fortnight. Dear me, yes! one gets used to nothing so quickly. And in the same way and with the same speed you get used to the absence of good looks. Anthony Maxwell, I allow, has but small claim to them; and I was only wondering whether, when you said that you did not love him, you did not have a half-conscious idea in your mind that if he was very handsome you might have. Dearest Maud, how wonderfully well you are looking! no wonder Anthony fell in love with you."