"Steady? Oh! perfectly. Poor, dear chap, he hasn't had much chance of being anything else as yet."
"Still, of course, Lady Calmady would prefer his being settled. Clearly it would be much better in every way. All things considered, he is certainly one of the people who should marry young. And Connie would be an excellent marriage for him, excellent—thoroughly suitable, better, really, than on the face of it he could hope for. Ludovic, just look out please and see if the carriage is here. Pocock always loses her head at a terminus, and misses the men-servants. Yes, there is Frederic—with his back to the train, looking the wrong way, of course. He really is too stupid."
Mr. Quayle, however, succeeded in attracting the footman's attention, and, assisted by that functionary and the lean and anxious Pocock—her arms full of bags and umbrellas—conveyed his sister out of the railway carriage and into the waiting brougham. She graciously offered to put him down at his rooms, in St. James's Place, on her way to the Barking mansion in Albert Gate, but the young man declined that honour.
"Good-bye, Louisa," he said, leaning his elbows on the open window of the brougham and thereby presenting the back view of an irreproachably cut overcoat and trousers to the passers-by. "I have to thank you for a most interesting and instructive journey. Your efforts to secure the prosperity of the family are wholly praiseworthy. I commend them. I have a profound respect for your generalship. Still, pauper though I am, I am willing to lay you a hundred to one in golden guineas that you will never square papa."
Subsequently the young man bestowed himself in a hansom, and rattled away in the wake of the Barking equipage down the objectionably steep hill which leads from the roar and turmoil of the station into the Waterloo Bridge road.
"I might have offered heavier odds," he said to himself, "for never, never will she square papa."
And, not without a light sense of shame, he was conscious that he made this reflection with a measure of relief.
CHAPTER XI
CONTAINING SAMPLES BOTH OF EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY LOVE