“A bad imitation of the loud English type, and fairly exudes larkiness and snobbery. She and Barnstaple lead a cat-and-dog life. She gives him immense sums to keep him from leaving her, for without him she’d drop out; she has no real hold. When she calls him a cad, he calls her a tuft-hunter, a parvenu, and a pushing failure.”
“Who was she? Cecil never told me.”
“Something very common—from Chicago, I think. She went to London a rich widow, but without letters to the other Americans in power, who are mostly New Yorkers with a proper contempt for the aristocracy of wealth in its first generation. She worked the Legation to some extent, and managed a few easy and gluttonous titles. But the big doors were shut in her face; she was managing herself badly, she had picked up with the wrong people, and she was about to give up the game when Maundrell and his debts came along. They flew at each other; he was heir presumptive to the earldom of Barnstaple, and his uncle was old. Maundrell’s first wife was a daughter of the Duke of Beaumanoir, a beautiful and charming creature, and one of the most popular women in London for eight years. The present owner of her precious husband could not have made a worse move than to succeed her. Well, to return to Cecil. He won’t have a penny but what his grandmother and stepmother allow him; and what he may inherit from both will not be enough to keep up the title, the way things are going now. Therefore, he must marry money——”
“Oh, bother! I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Answer me this—if Cecil Maundrell were out of the question, would you marry me?”
“You promised——”
“Not to propose. Fancy a man proposing at this hour in the morning, and after eight buckwheat cakes! To discuss the question in the abstract is quite another matter.”
“I don’t believe I could ever think of a man I had grown up with as anything but a brother.”
“You could if you would. It is merely a matter of readjusting yourself mentally. I am not your brother; I have hardly seen as much of you as Tom Brannan has; and——” he hesitated a moment—“you do not know me half so well as you think you do.”
Lee looked at him with a flash of curiosity, then she lifted her chin. “You want to intrigue me, as the French say. But I am not so easily managed, I know you quite well.”