“But she is not even in love with him!”
“I dare say not. He wants a wife: she accepts a husband. The two women who were in love with him he wouldn’t have.”
Lady Romfrey sighed deeply: “He has lost Cecilia! She might still have been his: but he has taken to that girl. And Madame de Rouaillout praises the girl because—oh! I see it—she has less to be jealous of in Miss Denham: of whose birth and blood we know nothing. Let that pass! If only she loved him! I cannot endure the thought of his marrying a girl who is not in love with him.”
“Just as you like, my dear.”
“I used to suspect Mr. Lydiard.”
“Perhaps he’s the man.”
“Oh, what an end of so brilliant a beginning!”
“It strikes me, my dear,” said the earl, “it’s the proper common sense beginning that may have a fairish end.”
“No, but what I feel is that he—our Nevil!—has accomplished hardly anything, if anything!”
“He hasn’t marched on London with a couple of hundred thousand men: no, he hasn’t done that,” the earl said, glancing back in his mind through Beauchamp’s career. “And he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No: we haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do: he got me down on my knees!”