"My romantic brother feels that I am wasting my young life in marrying Sir John Barclay," she declared, laughing lightly.
Paul grunted, and unfolded the morning paper. "There are plenty of men who aren't beggars. I do call it disgusting of Grisel to marry an old man simply because he's rich."
He looked younger and softer in his unexpected anger, and his mother's eyes rested on him with an odd expression of surprised relief. "He's right in theory, you know, darling," she agreed, turning to the girl. "Everybody'll say the same thing."
Grisel gave her ring a twist, and said nothing till the door had closed on the maid. Then she helped herself to butter. "Oh, I know. Crabbed age and youth—but Sir John—John, I mean—isn't crabbed—that's just the point. He's a perfectly charming man, and everyone says so, mother, and he's ever so young in some ways. He's worth," she added, with an odd little flush of humility, "worth a dozen of me."
"Nobody denies that," put in Paul, taking his tea from his mother. "You're a useless little baggage enough, everyone knows that. And I shouldn't say a word if there was any chance of you even really liking him, to say nothing of—of——" He broke off, and added gravely, as if he were making use of words that he feared, "of loving him."
His mother stared at him. "Why, what do you mean, Paul? You're being very rude, and it's wrong of you. Of course Grisel likes Sir John, and—and many women have loved husbands much older than themselves," she added shamefacedly, aware of her own duplicity, for she was a devoted believer in the union of youth to youth, and the growing old together of happy married couples. Whence she drew this romantic belief it would be hard to say, for the experience had certainly not come her way, and as it happened several of her married friends had come to grief. But it was her belief, and probably one of the secrets of the popularity of her books, for in her heyday people liked pleasant stories about pleasant people, who suffered, of course, through the machinations of the wicked, but who made their way steadily, through floods of tears, to the safe shores of the old-fashioned happy ending.
"I suppose the old fellow wears a padded coat and stays," Paul went on, less angry now, and settling down to a solid enjoyment of tormenting his little sister.
"Ass! He's only fifty-two, and isn't a bit that kind."
"What kind?"
"Oh, well, trying to be young. A stale beau. He seems a mere boy, for instance, in some ways, beside father."