“So you knew my friend Drake before?” said Lord Robert.
“I knew him when he was a boy,” said Glory.
And then he began to sing his friend's praises—how he had taken a brilliant degree at Oxford, and was now private secretary to the Home Secretary, and would go into public life before long; how he could paint and act, and might have made a reputation as a musician; how he went into the best houses, and was a first-rate official; how, in short, he had the promised land before him, and was just on the eve of entering it.
“Then I suppose you know he is rich—enormously rich?” said Lord Robert.
“Is he?” said Glory, and something great and grand seemed to shimmer a long way off.
“Enormously,” said Sir Robert; “and yet a man of the most democratic opinions.”
“Really?” said Glory.
“Yes,” said Lord Robert; “and all the way down in the hansom he has been trying to show me how impossible it is for him to marry a lady.”
“Now why did you tell me that I wonder?” said Glory, and Lord Robert began to fidget with his eye-glass.
Drake returned with Polly. He proposed that they should take the air in the quadrangle, and they went off for that purpose, the girls arm-in-arm some paces ahead.