“Then isn’t that all I want?—unless indeed I ought perhaps to ask rather if it isn’t all you do! At any rate,” said Lord John, “I may see you again here?”
She waited a moment. “You must have patience with me.”
“I am having it But after your father’s appeal.”
“Well,” she said, “that must come first.”
“Then you won’t dodge it?”
She looked at him straight “I don’t dodge, Lord John.”
He admired the manner of it “You look awfully handsome as you say so—and you see what that does to me.” As to attentuate a little the freedom of which he went on: “May I fondly hope that if Lady Imber too should wish to put in another word for me——?”
“Will I listen to her?”—it brought Lady Grace straight down. “No, Lord John, let me tell you at once that I’ll do nothing of the sort Kitty’s quite another affair, and I never listen to her a bit more than I can help.”
Lord John appeared to feel, on this, that he mustn’t too easily, in honour, abandon a person who had presented herself to him as an ally. “Ah, you strike me as a little hard on her. Your father himself—in his looser moments!—takes pleasure in what she says.”
Our young woman’s eyes, as they rested on him after this remark, had no mercy for its extreme feebleness. “If you mean that she’s the most reckless rattle one knows, and that she never looks so beautiful as when she’s at her worst, and that, always clever for where she makes out her interest, she has learnt to ‘get round’ him till he only sees through her eyes—if you mean that I understand you perfectly. But even if you think me horrid for reflecting so on my nearest and dearest, it’s not on the side on which he has most confidence in his elder daughter that his youngest is moved to have most confidence in him.”