“Well, isn’t that something to start with?”—he fairly pounced on it. “I’ll do any blest thing in life you like, I’ll accept any condition you impose, if you’ll only tell me you see your way.”
“Shouldn’t I have a little more first to see yours?” she asked. “When you say you’ll do anything in life I like, isn’t there anything you yourself want strongly enough to do?”
He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. “Anything that will make money, you mean?”
“Make money or make reputation—or even just make the time pass.”
“Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?” If that was her meaning he could show after an instant that he didn’t fear it. “Well, your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I’ve noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a fellow——!”
He left the obvious moral for her to take up—which she did, but all interrogatively. “The fellow at once comes in for something awfully good?”
“I don’t in the least mind your laughing at me,” Lord John returned, “for when I put him the question of the lift he’d give me by speaking to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in which he leaves you, and yet which doesn’t come—take my word!” said the young man sagely—“from his being at all indifferent.”
“No,” she answered—“father isn’t indifferent. But father’s ‘great’”
“Great indeed!”—her friend took it as with full comprehension. This appeared not to prevent, however, a second and more anxious thought. “Too great for you?”
“Well, he makes me feel—even as his daughter—my extreme comparative smallness.”