“I always thought her plain,” said a more frivolous listener.
“Fine eyes, fine figure, but plain,” said another, “and she was always so rude to the Prince.”
“Rude to everybody, and always looked bored,” said a person whose hand she had rejected.
“Subversive,” said the upholder of property. “Very odd: her father was so sound in all his views.”
“I think Billy’ll wake and walk!” said the gentleman who had before expressed this opinion; “all his pile split up into match wood!”
Daddy Gwyllian felt so vexed that he left them discussing the matter and went home. Why could not Ronnie have made himself agreeable to her before this horrible socialistic idea had come into her head, and so have held all that marvellously solid fortune together? It made him quite sad to think of these millions of good money frittered away in asylums and refuges and the dirty hands of a lot of hungry people.
Even Harrenden House was sold, they said, just as it stood, with all its admirable works of art, and the beckoning falconer of Clodion at the head of the staircase.
At the same moment the Duchess of Otterbourne was also reading this article in the Paris-New York journal. She thought it a hoax; a yarn spun by some mischievous spinner of sensational stories. When she heard however from all sides that it was true, she felt a kind of relief.
“Nobody will know her now,” she thought. “So she won’t be able to talk. It is really enough to wake that brute in his grave. I always considered her odious, but I should never have supposed she was mad.”
“What do you think of it?” she asked Vanderlin, whom she met the day she had read of this amazing piece of folly. He had not heard of it: she described the salient features of the narrative.