"Well, you can't both marry Mr. Gage," Lady Agatha argued, ignoring the personal citation. "And if you don't take care, the one he does not choose will lose Quorn as well."
"Well, for a peer and a millionaire," Dagmar observed decidedly, "they are the most hopeless specimens. Neither being in the least like what he ought to be, I should prefer the money. It is the only thing here that looks like what it is."
"I am thinking of your position, my dear," her mother replied insinuatingly. "Millionaires are getting so common and unpopular."
"Peers are common enough," Dagmar retorted. "They made a dozen—and such a dozen—the other day."
"Not old ones," rejoined Lady Agatha. "Quorn's peerage is centuries old, and improves with time."
"But I don't," returned her daughter pointedly. "And the idea of my descendants swaggering about with a coronet wherever they can put it, in the year 2147 doesn't amuse or comfort me at all, or reconcile me to the fact that nobody, without being told, would take Quorn for a peer, even if he dressed every day in robes and coronet, always supposing he could afford that somewhat expensive get-up."
"After all, a peerage is above money, my dear," Lady Agatha urged.
"Yes," was the quick reply, "it ought to be above it, and have the money underneath to support it. No, I prefer to take my chance of cutting out Ethel, and buying a peerage with some of Gage's money."
Lady Agatha shrugged. She could not bring herself to let Quorn slip through their fingers when they had him in hand. "There is as much difference between an old title and a new one as between new wine and old," she asserted dogmatically.
"Granted, mother," Dagmar assented cheerfully. "But when some idiot has pulled the cork out, causing the strength and the flavour to evaporate, and the dust has got in, the old is worse than the new."