She never liked her uncle Ronald; she was very pleased to see such a big, tall, grown-up man go away in discomfiture.
“You should have said it kinder, Boo,” murmured Jack, from above on the staircase.
“Why?” said Boo, with her chin in the air. “He don’t ever give us anything, at least, hardly ever.”
“Oh, yes, he does,” said Jack, with remonstrance. “And she’s cruel nasty. She’s took away the Punch, and sent away Harry.” He did not much like his uncle Ronald, but he was sorry for him now that he, too, was dismissed.
Hurstmanceaux was sad at heart as he walked down Great Stanhope Street into the Park; he was full of compunction for having, as he imagined, wronged his sister about the jewels, and he was deeply wounded by the unforgiving ingratitude of her feeling toward himself. He had made many sacrifices to her in the past, and although a generous temper does not count its gifts, he could not but feel that he received poor reward for a devotion to her interests which had impoverished him to a degree he could ill support. The day was bright and breezy, the flowers blazed with color, the season was at its height, everyone and everything around him was gay, but he himself felt that cheerless depression of spirit which is born in us of the ingratitude of those we cherish.
Katherine Massarene passed him, driving herself a pair of roan ponies. She thought how weary and grave he looked, so unlike the man who had laughed and talked with her as they had gone together over the snowy pastures and the frozen ditches of the hunting country more than two years before.
“It’s really flying in the face of Providence, Ronnie, not to marry the Massarene heiress,” said Daddy Gwyllian, that evening, in the stalls at Covent Garden, letting fall his lorgnon, after a prolonged examination of the Massarene box.
“I never knew that Providence kept a Bureau de Marriage,” replied Hurstmanceaux, “and I do not see what right you have to speak of that lady as if she were a filly without a bidder at Tattersall’s.”
“Without a bidder! Lord, no! She refuses ’em, they say, fifty a week. But you know, Ronnie, you do fetch women uncommonly; look what scores of ’em have been in love with you.”
“If they have, I am sure it has benefited them very little, and myself not at all,” replied Hurstmanceaux, very ungraciously.