“He’ll rage when he reads this,” continued the cabinet minister’s wife; “it is rather a give-away, I do think. He might have made them an allowance.”
“To think of her writing openly that, after all the labor she had had to get him to offer himself, it is too bad that she must wait indefinitely to be married!” The cousin sighed deeply. As she had been waiting twenty-five years for some allowance to be made for her own marriage, she felt a secret sympathy with Lady Verita.
“A most shocking confession,” said the cabinet minister’s wife, knowing just what the sigh meant, and being one of those wives who never regard an allowance as necessary when the maiden ladies of the family marry. And then she gathered up her wrap and departed.
The old duke, even if he was a beast, had always been a very dignified beast; but the commotion about his supposedly published parsimony shook even his conception of noble rights. He went in his big blue car to call at the house where the dreadful young woman stayed when she was at home. The countess, her mother, was laid up with her head, as usual. Lady Verita received his grace exactly as she received most persons in these trying times.
“I suppose it is the story,” she said as she greeted him. She wasn’t a bit afraid of him, having learned to regard him as much the same stuff as the rest of humanity, only more in her way.
“Yes, it is the story,” he said haughtily. He regarded it as most unfortunate that she herself differed so widely from the rest of humanity. “It’s really too bad of you, don’t you know. If Clifford wishes to marry, I’ll give him a little something regular. He ought to know that. You ought to know that. What’s the good of rowing?”
Lady Verita lowered her eyes. She thought that there had been a deal of good in rowing, since it had brought his close-fisted grace to this.
“But it’s very shocking to write it out for the hoi polloi, don’t you know,” the duke continued vigorously; “I must beg, if you marry Clifford, that we have no more of this kind of thing.”
“But it wasn’t meant for any one we know,” protested Lady Verita.
“Yes, it was,” said the duke, putting up his glass and glaring at her; “everything you’ve written has been straight from the shoulder. I read the other two, and it was rubbish to suppose you meant the French Revolution or Ireland. Ireland, indeed! Any one with half an eye could see what you meant. And I don’t need even half an eye to see what you mean now. You mean to marry Clifford, and you wish to do it at once. Dash it all! if putting it off is going to lead to more of these stories, and putting it forward will stop ’em, I’ll set you up in housekeeping to stop ’em. We can’t let this kind of thing continue.”