Lady Nina laughed. "My dear father gets more cynical every day. He insinuates as a general proposition, anyway it can be deduced from his remarks, that every man who marries a girl for love ought to be disillusioned shortly after the honeymoon. Well, certainly Guy is as much in love as ever, and, to be quite fair, she seems just as much in love with him."
"She's putting it on, I suppose," suggested Hugh, who in a less obtrusive fashion was nearly as cynical as his host. "If she came from nowhere, and nobody knows anything about her, we may safely assume that she married him for his money, and that he was too infatuated to recognise the fact. Is she very bewitching?"
"She is certainly very good-looking," was Nina's reply. "Many people say she is beautiful. From a man's point of view, she would be considered very charming in a subtle and elusive sort of way. Of course, my father hates her, it is a terrible shock to his pride to think she is going to inherit the family honours. Guy could have married anybody, although there would always have been still the danger that he would have been married for his money. When it comes to this point, there is not much difference between the well-born and low-born adventuress."
From which remarks it will be gathered that the Lady Nina Spencer was a young woman of independent opinions, and not too strongly imbued with caste prejudices.
Hugh reflected for a few moments. His thoughts had travelled back to those days at Blankfield, which now seemed so very far oft. What folly will not a certain type of man commit for the sake of a pretty woman? Jack Pomfret, in a moment of frenzy, had taken his life when he found he was tied up to a girl the accomplice and the decoy of a criminal.
And Guy Spencer, a man of a very different type from the easy-going, pleasure-loving Pomfret, had made a hash of his opportunities, flouted his family obligations, to pursue the desire of the moment, to marry out of his own class.
"What I hear is, that there is something very mysterious about her, that she preserves a strange reticence as to her past, makes no allusion to family or relatives. Does Guy know what other people do not know, and is he keeping his mouth shut? It is strange. Even if a man marries a ballet-girl, it comes out sooner or later that her father was a railway porter, or something of that sort." He pulled himself up suddenly, and added, awkwardly: "I say, you know, I am afraid I have been very indiscreet. I forgot for the moment that she is one of the family now."
A deep growl came from the Earl's armchair: "She is not one of the family, she never will be. If the young fool had not been left that money by his godmother he would never have dared to do this disgraceful thing. By gad, Hugh, it is over a hundred years since there was such a mésalliance in our family: please Heaven it will be a hundred years before there is another."
Nina took up the conversation at the point where her angry father left it.
"Of course, Hugh, you can say what you like. You are our old friend; you are Guy's for that matter, and we are prepared to discuss this thing with you quite frankly. Guy may know more than we imagine; personally, I think he knows very little, and only what she has told him."