“There is something I want you to do, Billy,” she added very candidly—she was always candid in manner. Mr. Massarene murmured that she had only to command and he only to obey.
“That is very nice of you, but there are other people in it,” she replied. He waited mutely to hear more. She sent some cigarette smoke across his eyes. “I mean you to marry your daughter to my brother.”
He was silent.
The thought was not new to his own mind; he had felt sure that she would desire it; but to himself it presented no attractions; he did not understand the antiquity and purity of the Courcy blood, and his own ambitions for his heiress ranged in much loftier spheres.
“Why don’t you answer?” said Mouse, beginning to feel offence. “I should have thought you would have been overjoyed.”
“They don’t know each other,” he objected feebly.
“What has that to do with it? When you and I settle a thing that thing has to be done. Ronnie and your daughter were made in heaven for each other; they are both awfully stiff, intensely disagreeable, and preëminently virtuous. There’d be no more cakes and ale in our world if those two could reform it.”
Mr. Massarene was still mute; he did not at all know what to say; at last he asked humbly if Lord Hurstmanceaux had said anything on the subject.
“I haven’t consulted him,” she replied, this time with genuine candor. “I never consult people when I am acting for their good, and my brother never talks unless he lectures somebody. This thing has to be done, Billy. You know when I say a thing I mean it.”
“But you laugh at my daughter,” he said with hesitation.