“What chance have I had to make her? I never see her alone, never get a chance to talk to her for half an hour at a time. You promised to help me —”
“Mrs. Winstone has never let the poor thing go for a minute. She’s overdone the business. Julia’s had no time to think, goes to sleep at problem plays, and knows no more than when she arrived —”
“If I only had the chance to teach her!” cried Herbert, with flashing eyes.
“Look at here,” said his sister-in-law, grasping a point of the screen with either hand; “let us have this out. If your brains are not addled, they must have conceived some sort of a plan. What is it? A liaison? An elopement? I approve of neither. I’d like to save the poor child from that man, but the frying pan’s as good as the fire —”
“No liaison! I’d elope with her to-morrow if she’d go with me —”
“And disgrace a great family!” said Ishbel, softly.
“Oh, hang the family,” cried Mrs. Herbert, whose mother’s blood was already working in her. “The duke’s an old pudding. Lady Arabella and her sisters are cracked old sign-posts; and a scandal would serve Mrs. Winstone right for not packing the child back on the next steamer to her sister with the whole unvarnished truth in a letter. Not she, however; she wants to be aunt to a duchess. What I’m thinking of is Julia. The conceit of man! What do you suppose you could give her in exchange for disgrace —”
“Love!” cried Nigel. “I tell you it can make up for anything when it is strong enough.”
“Yes, when it is,” said Mrs. Herbert, who, recovering from her own infatuation for a brainless beauty, was not in a romantic frame of mind. “But she doesn’t love you, in the first place, and in the second, no woman can live her life on love, any more than a man can. She wants children, position of some sort, the society of other women—that last is one of woman’s biggest wants, and no man ever realizes it.”
“But love must be a wonderful thing,” said Ishbel, who had never experienced it. “It would almost be worth any sacrifice, especially if one had had things first, only men are always so funny in one way or another; one becomes disenchanted just in the nick of time.”