"I don't believe you," she said frankly. "Else you'd move mountains to get the money for the pills, not turn up your nose at the mountain when it comes to you."
He laughed heartily. "What a delightful confusion of metaphors! I'm sure you've got Irish blood somewhere."
"Of course I have. Did I never tell you I am descended from the kings of Ireland?"
He took off his hat mockingly. "I salute Miss Brian Boru."
"You're an awfully good fellow," he told her on a later occasion. "I almost believe I'd take your money if you were not a woman." "If I were not a woman I should not offer it to you—I should want a career of my own."
"And my career would content you?" he asked, touched.
"Absolutely," she lied. "The interest I should take in it—wouldn't that be sufficient interest on the loan?"
"There is one thing you have taught me," he said slowly—"how conventional I am! But every prejudice in me shrinks from your proposition, much as I admire your manliness."
"Perhaps it could be put on more conventional lines—superficially," she suggested in a letter that harked back to this conversation. "One might go through conventional forms. That adorable Disraeli—I have just been reading his letters. How right he was not to marry for love!"
The penultimate stage of the pre-nuptial comedy was reached in the lobby of the Opera, while Society was squeezing to its carriage. It was after the Rheingold, and poor Lady Chelmer could hardly keep her eyes open, and actually dozed off as she leaned against a wall, in patient martyrdom. Walter Bassett had been specially irritating, for he had not come up to the box once, and everybody knows (as the Hon. Tolshunt had said, with unwonted brilliance) the Rheingold is in heavy bars.