"No," Peckover agreed with conviction. "He's not a bad sort, but he wouldn't be my fancy if I were a pretty girl."
"He's too glumpy for me," Ulrica declared. "And what's more I'm not going to have him."
"What'll the guv'nor say?" Peckover asked dubiously.
Miss Buffkin laughed. "Oh, father won't mind. You see," she went on confidentially, "this coronet racket isn't his idea at all. Not it."
"Yours?"
"Not likely. It is old Ormstork's. We ran across her at the Grand Oceanic at Harrogate. She hung on to us like a stoat on a rabbit. We couldn't make her game out, till one day she asked father what odds he would lay her that I didn't marry a peer. And she has been dragging me about the country ever since, till it has fairly come to pall."
"I should think so," observed Peckover sympathetically.
"I don't know," she continued, "how many noble heads I've been thrown at. But somehow I've always managed to rebound, and sometimes hit the old lady in the eye. You see, I like a live man, not a stuffed peer, with about as much soul as a gramaphone."
"I wish I was a peer," he said ruefully. "I'm alive all right."
"So you are," she agreed, gazing round the depressing park.