"He holds me too precious to be loved, but I am afraid there will be trouble when I send him away."
"I wonder," reflected Haversham.
"I am sure of it," she insisted.
"He may surprise you yet," answered Haversham. "There is a blind side to Peter. Sometimes I think he was intended for a monk. He has a dedicated look."
"He loves me, Tony, and he will discover it."
"Cannot you spare him the knowledge?"
Lady Mary shook her head.
"Peter loved me at Highbury," she insisted. "I shall have nothing on my conscience."
Haversham sat that night in his room in quiet contemplation of the advice he had instinctively given to his sister. It displeased him to think how promptly and easily he had declared against the friend of his own years. He realised that a season or so ago he would not so immediately have perceived where his sister's duty lay. Was there, after all, something in Peter's ineradicable contempt for politics? Did they not rub the finer edges from a man?
Peter, after all, was his friend. He saw him with a pang, eager and impetuous; and knew how savagely his sister's marriage with Wenderby would tear him. There was nothing tangibly ignoble—nothing that a man of worldly years would boggle at—in Wenderby's proposal to Lady Mary. Nevertheless Haversham realised that young Marbury twelve months ago would have recoiled with a faint disgust from this attempt upon his sister. Undoubtedly he had changed. A year of politics, of arrangements and compromises, of difficult dealings with men of many tempers and desires, had caused young Marbury to seem like a legend, remote and debonair, to thoughtful Haversham. He had, almost without thinking, thrown over his friend, perceived the wisdom of his sister's great alliance, and quite overlooked the faint soil in Wenderby of a finesse which a year ago would rudely have jarred him.