"Half the parents in London would jump at the chance of one of their girls making such a marriage,"—this from Lady Louisa.
Mr. Quayle looked over his shoulder and registered a conviction that his father did not belong to that active, parental moiety. He sat stubbornly on a straight-backed, white-and-gold chair, his hands clasped on the top of his favourite, gold-headed walking-stick. He had refused to part with this weapon on entering the house. It gave him a sense of authority, of security. Meanwhile his habitually placid and infantile countenance wore an expression of the acutest worry.
"Would they, though?" he said, in response to his daughter's information regarding the jumping moiety.—"Well, I shouldn't. In point of fact, I don't. All that you and Alicia tell me may be perfectly true, my dear Louisa. I would not, for a moment, attempt to discredit your statements. And I don't wish to be intemperate.—Stupid thing intemperance, sign of weakness, intemperance.—Still I must repeat, and I do repeat, I repeat clearly, that I do not approve of this engagement."
"Did not I prophesy long, long ago what my father's attitude would be, Louisa?" Mr. Quayle murmured gently, over his shoulder.
Then he fell to contemplating the portrait of his brother Guy, aged seven, who was represented arrayed in a brown-holland blouse of singular formlessness confined at the waist by a black leather belt, and carrying, cupid-like, in his hands a bow and arrows decorated with sky-blue ribbons.—"Were my brothers and I actually such appallingly insipid-looking little idiots?" he asked himself. "In that case the years do bring compensations. We really bear fewer outward traces of utter imbecility now."
"I don't wish to be harsh with you, my dears—never have been harsh, to my knowledge, with any one of my children. Believe in kindness. Always have been lenient with my children——"
"And as indirect consequence thereof note my eldest brother's frequent epistles to the Hebrews!" commented Mr. Quayle softly. "The sweet simplicity of this counterfeit presentment of him, armed with a pea-green bait-tin and jointless fishing-rod, hardly shadows forth the copious insolvencies of recent times!"
"Never have approved of harshness," continued Lord Fallowfeild. "Still I do feel I should have been given an opportunity of speaking my mind sooner. I ought to have been referred to in the first place. It was my right. It was due to me. I don't wish to assert my authority in a tyrannical manner. Hate tyranny, always have hated parental tyranny. Still I feel that it was due to me. And Shotover quite agrees with me. Talked in a very nice, gentlemanly, high-minded way about it all this morning, did Shotover."
The two ladies exchanged glances, drawing themselves up with an assumption of reticence and severity.
"Really!" exclaimed Lady Alicia. "It seems a pity, papa, that Shotover's actions are not a little more in keeping with his conversation, then."