"By not being serious. It isn't so hard to prevent people giving you money."
"Serious?" Grace repeated. "Does he want him to be a prig like Lord Egbert?"
"Yes—that's exactly what he wants. And what he'll do for him he'll do for him only if he marries Julia."
"Has he told you?" Grace inquired. And then, before her mother could answer, "I'm delighted at that!" she cried.
"He hasn't told me, but that's the way things happen." Lady Agnes was less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as she cultivated was a thin tissue with the sense of things as they are showing through. "If Nick becomes rich Charles Carteret will make him more so. If he doesn't he won't give him a shilling."
"Oh mamma!" Grace demurred.
"It's all very well to say that in public life money isn't as necessary as it used to be," her ladyship went on broodingly. "Those who say so don't know anything about it. It's always intensely necessary."
Her daughter, visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, felt impelled to evoke as a corrective a more cheerful idea. "I daresay; but there's the fact—isn't there?—that poor papa had so little."
"Yes, and there's the fact that it killed him!"
These words came out with a strange, quick, little flare of passion. They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and gasped, "Oh mother!" The next instant, however, she added in a different voice, "Oh Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to them.