"She is near her fall, Mr. Heron! You cannot know. You have lived far away, and do not see what we see. She has proved faithless to her mission."
"Something—yes—there I agree," Mr. Heron eagerly interposed, thinking of the St. Xavier's settlements.
"She was the cradle of freedom," Mrs. Money went on. "She ought to have been always its nursery and home. What have we now, Mr. Heron? A people absolutely in servitude, the principle of caste everywhere triumphant—corruption in the aristocracy—corruption in the city. No man now dares to serve his country except at the penalty of suffering the blackest ingratitude!"
Mr. Heron was startled. He did not know that Mrs. Money was arguing only from the assumption that her husband was a very great man, who would have done wonderful things for England if a perverse and base ruling class had not thwarted him, and treated him badly.
"England," Theresa Money said, smiling sweetly, but with a suffusion of melancholy, "can hardly be regenerated until she is once more dipped in the holy well."
"You see we all think differently, Mr. Heron," said the eager Lucy. "Mamma thinks we want a republic. Tessy is a saint, and would like to see roadside shrines."
"And you?" Heron asked, pleased with the girl's bright eyes and winning ways.
"Oh—I only believe in the regeneration of England through the renaissance of art. So we all have our different theories, you see, but we all agree to differ, and we don't quarrel much. Papa laughs at us all when he has time. But just now I am taken up with Nola Grey. If I were a man, I should make an idol of her. That lovely, statuesque face, that figure—like the Diana of the Louvre!"
Mr. Heron looked and admired, but one person's raptures about man or woman seldom awaken corresponding raptures in impartial breasts. He saw, however, a handsome, ladylike girl, who conveyed to him a sort of chilling impression.
"She was my schoolfellow at Keeton," Lucy went on, "and she was so good and clever that I adored her then, and I do now again. She has come to London to live alone, and I am sure she must have some strange and romantic story."