“You want all the hideous vulgarity of a fashionable wedding, my dear mother,” said Katherine. “If ever I should marry I assure you I shall wear a white cotton gown and go alone to some remote village church.”
“My dear, how can you say such things? It is quite shocking to hear you,” said the mistress of Harrenden House, infinitely distressed.
“Pray set your mind at ease,” said her daughter. “I shall never marry, for the best of all reasons that no man whom I could respect would ever marry me.”
“Not respect ye! How can you say such things? You’re the daughter of one of the richest men in the whole world, and he’ll be noble as well, he says, afore he goes to Kingdom Come.”
The younger woman lifted her head, like a forest-doe who hears the crack of a carter’s whip.
“To belong to the Peerage is not necessarily to belong to the nobility; and you may belong to the nobility without being included in the Peerage. Sir Edward Coke laid down that law. Surely, my dear mother, you cannot for a moment pretend that if my father be given a peerage he will become noble?”
Katherine Massarene knew that she might as well have spoken to the Clodion on the staircase, as said these reasonable things to her mother; but now and then she could not wholly keep back the expression of the scorn of her father’s ambitions which moved her—ambitions, in her eyes, so peurile and so poor.
“Who was Edward Coke?” said Mrs. Massarene sullenly.
“The greatest lawyer England has ever seen. The greatest exponent of Common Law.”
“Well, then, I think he might have known better than to deny as his sovereign can make a gentleman of anybody if so be she choose,” said her mother doggedly.