The Outcry

sion his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn’t want to go?” And

me. “I think perhaps

euce is a litt

with her — and whom she

then?” Lord T

tures — which he seems p

hip easier. “Then he’s a

the less just wonder. “Ha

, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve ha

y it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John’s face a l

“She has her friends by the score — at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also — to know t

t once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn’t been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never

u, with the last subtlety of displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you, “sink” a hundred other attributes — or the recognition at least and the formulation of them — that you might abjectly have taken for granted in him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion, you might infer — to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if

anion has meanwhile replied to it. “But I was thinking a

erlopers even but slightly accredited. He seemed thus not at all to strain to “understand” in this particular connection — it would b

ind me, with her fine old frankness, that she would like to learn without more delay where, on the whole question, she is, don’t you know? What she put to me”— the younger man felt his ground a little, but proceeded further —“what she put to me, with her rat

ccessfully! — for everything, and it suits her down to the ground. She pays her beastly debt — that is, I mean to say,” and he took himself up, though it w

t, don’t we? not only the fact of my mother’s desire (intended, I assure you, to be most flattering) that Lady Grace shall

g with you at all a business one or two of whose aspects so little appeal to me: especially as there’s nothing, you easily conceive, that a daughter of mine can come in for by entering even your family, or any other (as

“Definitely, yes, of your settl

ll the equivalent o

o charming as Lady Grace herself, I dare

e, at this highly inconvenient time,

for his friend’s general resources, to consider that questio

l Street! Do you call it the moment for me to have liked to see myself all but cajoled int

y have removed the incubus — which, I grant you, she must and you must feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imber and marry Lady

opinion of you?”— Lord Theign

thoroughly likes me and that — though a fellow feels an as

l round? Then,” said Lord Thei

itive mother’s wants. Those are her ‘terms,’ and I don’t mind saying that they’re most disagreeable to me — I quite hate ’em: there! Only I think it

, if I didn’t believe you’d be really good to her

ill just tell her then, now and here, ho

him. “You truly hold that that friendly guarantee

conviction I

s just, that still doesn’t tell me into which of my very e

stion of pockets — and what’s in ’em-here precisely is my man!” This personage had come back from his tour of observation and was now, on the threshold of the hall, exhibited to Lord Theign as