"I am not saying anything against her respectability," said poor Mrs Trefusis. "Heaven knows if there had been anything against it I should have said so before now. It would have been my duty."
Anne smiled faintly. "A painful duty."
"I'm not so sure," said Mrs Trefusis grimly. She never posed before Anne, nor, for that matter, did any one else. "But from all I can make out this girl is a model of middle-class respectability. Yet she comes of a bad stock. One can't tell how she will turn out. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh."
"There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth married his daughter's maid last week."
"I don't know what I've done," said Mrs Trefusis, "that my only son should marry a pretty horse-breaker."
"I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker."
"So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first met her."
"She rides magnificently. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and asked who she was."
"Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of drugging some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was disgraceful. He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall have to know him now. The place will be overrun with her relations, whom I have avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me."