“Rather more than less,” said Dr. Graves.
“What will she do with it?”
“Ah! that is just what all the world is wondering!”
“She’ll be a fine catch for somebody!”
“I doubt it. She is not likely to be caught with any of the ordinary baits with which men fish for heiresses. She has a fine brain and ideas of her own which she will be likely to carry out, I fancy, before she is much older—expensive ideas, too, that may melt her fortune like snow before the sun.”
“Oh! but she is not extravagant?”
“No, because she has never yet discovered anything worth spending money upon. Ideas, notions, crazes, run away with a good deal more money than can be spent in Bond Street or the Palais Royal, you know.”
“But she does not want to convert the dwellers on the Congo to Paris fashions and Society journalism?”
“No; but you will find, unless somebody marries her, that she will spend the money on some mad humanitarian scheme quite as ridiculous.”
It was a little remarkable, perhaps, that these gentlemen, who owed their position to the great medical charity which absorbed their daily interests, should object to money being devoted to philanthropic purposes. Probably they had left their benevolent feelings in London when they donned their unprofessional travelling suits, and started for a two-months’ Iberian trip, and put themselves under the influences of history, poetry and romance. It would have taken a great deal of either to have warmed or softened the heart of Mr. Crowe; but Dr. Graves fell speedily under their domination, and became almost a devotee in some of the more magnificent of the historic cathedrals of the peninsula.