“Hesketh’s a very good sort of Englishman,” said Lorne.
“He’s awfully well off, isn’t he?”
“According to our ideas I suppose he is,” said Lorne. “Not according to English ideas.”
“Still less according to New York ones, then,” asserted Dora. “They wouldn’t think much of it there even if he passed for rich in England.” It was a little as if she resented Lorne’s comparison of standards, and claimed the American one as at least cis-Atlantic.
“He has a settled income,” said Lorne, “and he’s never had to work for it, whatever luck there is in that. That’s all I know. Dora—”
“Now, Lorne, you’re not to be troublesome.”
“Your mother hasn’t come in at all this evening. Don’t you think it’s a good sign?”
“She isn’t quite so silly as she was,” remarked Dora. “Why I should not have the same freedom as other girls in entertaining my gentleman friends I never could quite see.”
“I believe if we told her we had made up our minds it would be all right,” he pleaded.
“I’m not so sure Lorne. Mother’s so deep. You can’t always tell just by what she DOES. She thinks Stephen Stuart likes me—it’s too perfectly idiotic; we are the merest friends—and when it’s any question of you and Stephen—well, she doesn’t say anything, but she lets me see! She thinks such a lot of the Stuarts because Stephen’s father was Ontario Premier once, and got knighted.”