He kept his eyes on her. “Then how far has it gone?”
Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. “Well, not even yet, I think, so far as they’d like.”
“They’d ‘like’—heaven save the mark!—to marry?”
“I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that,” she asked, “would you then take?”
He was perfectly prompt. “The line that for Grace it’s simply ignoble.”
The force of her deprecation of such language was qualified by tact. “Ah, darling, as dreadful as that?”
He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. “It lets us so down—from what we’ve always been and done; so down, down, down that I’m amazed you don’t feel it!”
“Oh, I feel there’s still plenty to keep you up!” she soothingly laughed.
He seemed to consider this vague amount—which he apparently judged, however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature. “Well, my dear,” he thus more blandly professed, “I shall need all the extra agrément that your affection can supply.”
If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. “Ah, my affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in flood; but in any more worldly element than that—as you’ve ever seen for yourself—a poor strand with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not ‘great’ as they used so finely to call it! You are—with the natural sense of greatness and, for supreme support, the instinctive grand man doing and taking things.”