Mr. Milbrey sighed, deprecatingly. He could remember no time within five years when that necessity had not weighed upon his father's sense of duty like a vast boulder of granite. He turned to welcome the diversion provided by the rognons sautees which Jarvis at that moment uncovered before him with a discreet flourish.
"Now you really must," continued his wife, "and you'll agree with me when I tell you why."
"But, my dear, I've already talked to the girl exhaustively. I've pointed out that her treatment of Mrs. Wybert—her perverse refusal to meet the lady at all, is quite as absurd as it is rude, and that if Fred chooses to marry Mrs. Wybert it is her duty to act the part of a sister even if she cannot bring herself to feel it. I've assured her that Mrs. Wybert's antecedents are all they should be; not illustrious, perhaps, but eminently respectable. Indeed, I quite approve of the Southern aristocracy. But she constantly recalls what that snobbish Bines was unfair enough to tell her. I've done my utmost to convince her that Bines spoke in the way he did about Mrs. Wybert because he knew she was aware of those ridiculous tales of his mother's illiteracy. But Avice is—er—my dear, she is like her mother in more ways than one. Assuredly she doesn't take it from me."
He became interested in the kidneys. "If Marie had been a man," he remarked, feelingly, "I often suspect that her fame as a chef would have been second to none. Really, the suavity of her sauces is a never-ending delight to me."
"I haven't told you yet the reason—a new reason—why you must talk to Avice."
"The money—yes, yes, my dear, I know, we all know. Indeed, I've put it to her plainly. She knows how sorely Fred needs it. She knows how that beast of a tailor is threatening to be nasty—and I've explained how invaluable Mrs. Wybert would be, reminding her of that lady's generous hint about the rise in Federal Steel, which enabled me to net the neat little profit of ten thousand dollars a month ago, and how, but for that, we might have been acutely distressed. Yet she stubbornly clings to the notion that this marriage would be a mesalliance for the Milbreys."
"I agree with her," replied his wife, tersely.
Mr. Milbrey looked perplexed but polite.
"I quite agree with Avice," continued the lady. "That woman hasn't been right, Horace, and she isn't right. Young Bines knew what he was talking about. I haven't lived my years without being able to tell that after five minutes with her, clever as she is. I can read her. Like so many of those women, she has an intense passion to be thought respectable, and she's come into money enough—God only knows how—to gratify it. I could tell it, if nothing else showed it, by the way in which she overdoes respectability. She has the thousand and one artificial little rules for propriety that one never does have when one has been bred to it. That kind of woman is certain to lapse sooner or later. She would marry Fred because of his standing, because he's a favourite with the smart people she thinks she'd like to be pally with. Then, after a little she'd run off with a German-dialect comedian or something, like that appalling person Normie Whitmund married."
"But the desire to be respectable, my dear—and you say this woman has it—is a mighty lever. I'm no cynic about your sex, but I shudder to think of their—ah—eccentricities if it should cease to be a factor in the feminine equation."