“You might have told him,” said the duke drily, “that there are old-fashioned persons who think that their acquaintance should be kept as clean as their hands.”
“That he wouldn’t understand,” replied Mouse.
“What makes you protect such people?”
“Oh! I don’t know! In other ages everybody had a pet jester; now everybody has a pet parvenu. One runs him; it’s great fun.”
The duke was silent.
“You know,” she continued, “he bought Vale Royal of Gerald. Surely all the family ought to be rather nice to him?”
“You surprise me,” replied the duke. “I sold Seeton Pastures to a grazier last year; but the obligation to be ‘nice’ to the purchaser was not in the contract. The sale of Vale Royal was a great disgrace to Roxhall, for his affairs were by no means in such a state as to necessitate or excuse it. But whether his loss or his gain, the sale is certainly his affair; and no one else’s.”
“Oh, you look at things so—so—stiffly,” said his daughter-in-law. “We don’t, you know.”
“I am aware that you do not,” said Otterbourne with significance; and dropped the subject.
When Clare Courcy, lovely as a dream, had been first married to his son, the duke, fascinated out of his better judgment, had admired and been inclined to love his daughter-in-law. Even now he could not be wholly insensible always to the witchery of the prettiest woman in England. He knew her worthlessness; he was aware that his son, bad as he had been before, had become ten times worse in every way since his marriage; he could never see the little black-eyed, fair-haired cherubs of the Kenilworth nurseries without a sigh and a curse in his own thoughts; but she at certain moments fascinated him still.