Cedric's voice held all the pitying scorn of the successful.
"Poor Barbara," said Alex.
"That's just what she is. Of course, I think myself that Pamela will make your share over to you again when she marries. She's not likely to make a rotten bad match like Barbara—far from it. But until then she can't do anything, you know—at least, not until she's of age, if then."
Cedric stopped, and his right hand tapped with his spectacles on his left hand, in the little, characteristic trick that was so like Sir Francis.
Alex had already heard him make much the same observations, but she realized that Cedric had retained all his old knack of reiteration.
"I see," she said.
"Well, my dear, the long and the short of it is, that you must let me be your banker for the time being. And—and, Alex," said Cedric, with a most unwonted touch of embarrassment breaking into his kind, assured manner, "you needn't mind taking it. There's—there's plenty of money here—there is really—now-a-days."
Alex realized afterwards that it would hardly have occurred to her to mind taking the twenty pounds which Cedric offered her with such patent diffidence. She had never known the want of money, either in her Clevedon Square days or during her ten years of convent life. She did not realize its value in the eyes of other people.
The isolation of her point of view on this and other kindred subjects gradually became evident to her. Her scale of relative values had remained that which had been set before her in the early days of her novitiate. That held by her present surroundings differed from it in almost every particular, and more especially in degree of concentration. All Violet's warm, healthy affection for Rosemary did not prevent her intense preoccupation with her own clothes and her own jewels, or her innocently-assured conviction that no one was ever in London during the month of August, and that to be so would constitute a calamity.
All Cedric's pride in' his wife and love for her, in no way lessened his manifest satisfaction at his own success in life and at the renovated fortunes of the house of Clare.