"I do," interrupted his friend. "She is a charming, gentle old dear; narrow, if you call it so, clear-headed and delightful. She adores her only son, and thinks quite properly that his name, his estates, beautiful if mortgaged, are a fair exchange for an American dot. Maurice de Presle-Vaulx, after all, does not go poverty-stricken to the woman he marries. There are not so many ways to live after one is twenty-five, and to uproot this scion of an old race, to exact such a sacrifice——"
"It would make a man of him."
"He is one already. There are all kinds, I need not tell you so."
"He is head over heels in debt."
Mrs. Falconer laughed again.
"We make him out an acrobat between us."
"He gambles on borrowed money."
"You mean that you have forced him to borrow from you? He will pay what he owes, I am sure of him."
Bulstrode wheeled and scrutinized her, and said with the natural asperity of a man who is bored by a woman's too generous championship of another man:
"You stand for him warmly."