'I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, 'and you know I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon that argument.'
'Good gracious, Hugh!' cried Lady Charlotte crossly; 'you talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself—I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last few weeks since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I have got you into the scrape—now I want to get you out of it! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses—and you know what the duke will say.'
'The duke be—translated!' said Flaxman coolly. 'Nothing of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care—or I am very much mistaken—for somebody else.'
He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.
'What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of hers?'
'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' replied her nephew. 'However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.
'Another instance of what university reputation is worth!' said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the force majeure of a rival—and that a rival whom she regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.
Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical amused eyes.
'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious slowness and suavity, 'I should greatly like to know why you asked him here to-night?'
'You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody—a convict, a crossing-sweeper—if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with him!'