He was genuinely concerned that his old chum should not meet that impossible little red-headed Irish heathen whom an unkind fate had dropped down in their midst.
At the hall-door Mrs. Chichester told Jarvis that her niece was not to leave her room without permission.
As Mrs. Chichester and Alaric passed out they little dreamt that the same relentless fate was planning still further humiliations for the unfortunate family and through the new and unwelcome addition to it.
CHAPTER VI
JERRY
Peg was shown by the maid, Bennett, into a charming old-world room overlooking the rose garden. Everything about it was in the most exquisite taste. The furniture was of white and gold, the vases of Sevres, a few admirable prints on the walls and roses everywhere.
Left to her reflections, poor Peg found herself wondering how people, with so much that was beautiful around them, could live and act as the Chichester family apparently did. They seemed to borrow nothing from their once illustrious and prosperous dead. They were, it would appear, only concerned with a particularly near present.
The splendour of the house awed—the narrowness of the people irritated her. What an unequal condition of things where such people were endowed with so much of the world's goods, while her father had to struggle all his life for the bare necessities!
She had heard her father say once that the only value money had, outside of one's immediate requirements, was to be able to relieve other people's misery: and that if we just spent it on ourselves money became a monster that stripped life of all happiness, all illusion, all love—and made it just a selfish mockery of a world!