“You know perfectly well no woman ever did make anything of a doomed man. He'd kill her—I mean it, Kemp! He would literally kill her with grief. She isn't like Leila Mortimer; she isn't like most girls of her sort. You men think her a rather stunning, highly tempered, unreasonable young girl, with a reserve of sufficiently trained intelligence to marry the best our market offers—and close her eyes;—a thoroughbred with the caprices of one, but also with the grafted instinct for proper mating.”
“Well, that's all right, isn't it?” asked Ferrall. “That's the way I size her up. Isn't it correct?”
“Yes, in a way. She has all the expensive training of the thoroughbred—and all the ignorance, too. She is cold-blooded because wholesome; a trifle sceptical because so absolutely unawakened. She never experienced a deep emotion. Impulses have intoxicated her once or twice—as when she asked my opinion about running off with Cavendish, and that boy and girl escapade with Rivington; nothing at all except high mettle, the innocent daring lurking in all thoroughbreds, and a great deal of very red blood racing through that superb young body. But,” Ferrall reined in to listen, “but if ever a man awakens her—I don't care who he is—you'll see a girl you never knew, a brand-new creature emerge with the last rags and laces of conventionality dropping from her; a woman, Kemp, heiress to every generous impulse, every emotion, every vice, every virtue of all that brilliant race of hers.”
“You seem to know,” he said, amused and curious.
“I know. Major Belwether told me that he had thought of Howard as an anchor for her. It seemed a pity—Howard with all his cold, heavy negative inertia.... I said I'd do it. I did. And now I don't know; I wish, almost wish I hadn't.”
“What has changed your ideas?”
“I don't know. Howard is safer than Stephen Siward, already in the first clutches of his master-vice. Would you mate what she inherits from her mother and her mother's mother, with what is that poor boy's heritage from the Siwards?”
“After all,” observed Ferrall dryly, “we're not in the angel-breeding business.”
“We ought to be. Every decent person ought to be. If they were, inherited vice would be as rare in this country as smallpox!”
“People don't inherit smallpox, dear.”