Mr. Colfox coloured violently at this direct question—assuredly not easy to answer truthfully without hazard of offence.
“I was not at the ball—I—I heard people talk a little—in the way people talk of everything—about Lostwithiel’s attention to Mrs. Disney, and about her prettiness—they all agreed that if not the loveliest woman in the room, she was at least the most interesting.”
“It was very natural that he should admire her; but I don’t think Martin liked Mr. Crowther’s talking about it in that way, at the dinner-table. The man is horridly underbred. Has Lord Lostwithiel what you call—” she hesitated a little—“a good character?”
“I don’t know about the present. I have heard that in the past his reputation was not altogether good.”
“I understand,” said Allegra, quickly. “The admiration of such a man is an insult; and that is why Mr. Crowther harped upon the fact. I am sure he is a malevolent man.”
“Don’t be hard upon him, Miss Leland. I believe he has only the misfortune to be a cad—a cad by birth, education, and associations. Don’t fling your stone at such a man—consider what an unhappy fate it is.”
“Oh, but he does not think himself unhappy. He is bursting with self-importance and the pride of riches. He is the typical rich man of the Psalmist. He must be the happiest man in Trelasco, a thick-skinned man whom nothing can hurt.”
“I am sorry you think so badly of poor Mr. Crowther, because I am really attached to his wife. She is one of the best women I know.”
“So my sister tells me, and I was very much taken with her myself, but one cannot afford to be friendly with Mrs. Crowther at the cost of knowing her husband.”
She spoke with some touch of the insolence of youth, which sets so high a value upon its own opinions and its own independence, and looks upon all the rest of humanity as upon a lower plane. And this arrogant youth, which thinks so meanly of the multitude, will make its own exceptions, and reverence its chosen ideals with a blind hero-worship—for its love is always an upward-looking love, “the desire of the moth for the star.”