Faded marigolds!  Is not that intensely sweet?’

’Very well for your sleepy Keats, but I don’t suppose you would have noticed the passage if marigolds were not in fashion,’ said Mary, with a touch of scorn.  ’What could happen?  Why a hundred things—­an earthquake, flood, or fire.  What could happen, do you say, Lesbia?  Why Maulevrier might come home unexpectedly, and charm us out of this death-in-life.’

‘He would occasion a good deal of unpleasantness if he did,’ answered Lesbia, coldly.  ‘You know how angry he has made grandmother.’

‘Because he keeps race-horses which have an unlucky knack of losing,’ said Mary, dubiously.  ’I suppose if his horses won, grandmother would rather approve?’

’Not at all.  That would make hardly any difference, except that he would not ruin himself quite so quickly.  Grandmother says that a young man who goes on the turf is sure to be ruined sooner or later.  And then Maulevrier’s habits are altogether wild and foolish.  It is very hard upon grandmother, who has such noble ambition for all of us.’

‘Not for me,’ answered Mary smiling.  ’Her views about me are very humble.  She considers that I shall be most fortunate if a doctor or a lawyer condescend to like me well enough to make me an offer.  He might make me the offer without liking me, for the sake of hearing himself and his wife announced as Mr. and Lady Mary Snooks at dinner parties.  That would be too horrid!  But I daresay such things have happened.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Mary,’ said Lesbia, loftily.  ’There is no reason why you should not make a really good marriage, if you follow grandmother’s advice and don’t affect eccentricity.’

‘I don’t affect eccentricity, but I’m afraid I really am eccentric,’ murmured Mary, meekly, ’for I like so many things I ought not to like, and detest so many things which I ought to admire.’

‘I daresay you will have tamed down a little before you are presented,’ said Lesbia, carelessly.

She could not even affect a profound interest in anyone but herself.  She had a narrowness of mental vision which prevented her looking beyond the limited circle of her own pleasures, her own desires, her own dreams and hopes.  She was one of those strictly correct young women who was not likely to do much harm in the world but who was just as unlikely to do any good.  Mary sighed, and went back to her book, a bulky volume of travels, and tried to lose herself in the sandy wastes of Africa, and to be deeply interested in the sources of the Congo, not, in her heart of hearts, caring a straw whether that far-away river comes from the mountains of the moon, or from the moon itself.  To-day she could not pin her mind to pages which might have interested her at another time.  Her thoughts were with Lord Maulevrier, that fondly-loved only brother, just seven years her senior, who had taken to race-horses and bad ways, and seemed to be trying his hardest to dissipate the splendid fortune which his grandmother, the dowager Countess, had nursed so judiciously during his long minority.  Maulevrier and Mary had always been what the young man called ‘no end of chums.’