"Look at all the papers!" said Grace. "Did you ever hear him speak?" she asked. And when Peter reminded her how he had spent his life in foreign lands, shut out from such pleasures, she went on: "Well, you lost something."
"It was very charming," said Lady Agnes quietly and poignantly.
"Of course he's charming, whatever he does," Peter returned. "He'll be a charming artist."
"Oh God help us!" the poor lady groaned, rising quickly.
"He won't—that's the worst," Grace amended. "It isn't as if he'd do things people would like, I've been to his place, and I never saw such a horrid lot of things—not at all clever or pretty."
Yet her mother, at this, turned upon her with sudden asperity. "You know nothing whatever about the matter!" Then she added for Peter that, as it happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very clever—Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything the poor child could learn was now no more than her duty—there was so little knowing what the future had in store for them all.
"You think too much of the future—you take terribly gloomy views," said Peter, looking for his hat.
"What other views can one take when one's son has deliberately thrown away a fortune?"
"Thrown one away? Do you mean through not marrying——?"
"I mean through killing by his perversity the best friend he ever had."