"Ah what Nick is—that's what I sometimes wonder!"
Grace eyed her parent in some despair: "Why, mother, isn't he going to be like papa?" She waited for an answer that didn't come; after which she pursued: "I thought you thought him so like him already."
"Well, I don't," said Lady Agnes quietly.
"Who is then? Certainly Percy isn't."
Lady Agnes was silent a space. "There's no one like your father."
"Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition: "It would be so jolly for all of us—she'd be so nice to us."
"She's that already—in her way," said Lady Agnes conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much good does it do her!" And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before.
"It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate keep other women off."
"Don't meddle—you're very clumsy," was her mother's not particularly sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are beautiful, and there are others who are clever and rich."
"Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her fortune would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her for it."