“Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to go any farther?”
“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to his personal comfort which she always decided.
“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must, as a father, take some interest in it.”
Pasmer's noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.
“Why, I don't know that he's going to ask you anything. I don't know whether he's said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some exasperation.
Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.
“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”
“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn't you want them to be taken with each other?”
“That is what you are to decide.”
Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.