As to the rest of Miss Lawrence's gossip--that Warkworth was supposed to have "behaved badly," to have led the pretty child to compromise herself with him at Simla in ways which Simla society regarded as inadmissible and "bad form"; that the guardians had angrily intervened, and that he was under a promise, habitually broken by the connivance of the girl's mother, not to see or correspond with the heiress till she was twenty-one, in other words, for the next two years--what did these things matter to her? Had she ever supposed that Warkworth, in regard to money or his career, was influenced by any other than the ordinary worldly motives? She knew very well that he was neither saint nor ascetic. These details--or accusations--did not, properly speaking, concern her at all. She had divined and accepted his character, in all its average human selfishness and faultiness, long ago. She loved him passionately in spite of it--perhaps, if the truth were known, because of it. As for the marrying, or rather the courting, for money, that excited in her no repulsion whatever. Julie, in her own way, was a great romantic; but owing to the economic notions of marriage, especially the whole conception of the _dot_, prevailing in the French or Belgian minds amid whom she had passed her later girlhood, she never dreamed for a moment of blaming Warkworth for placing money foremost in his plans of matrimony. She resembled one of the famous _amoureuses_ of the eighteenth century, who in writing to the man she loved but could not marry, advises him to take a wife to mend his fortunes, and proposes to him various tempting morsels--_une jeune personne_, sixteen, with neither father nor mother, only a brother. "They will give her on her marriage thirteen thousand francs a year, and the aunt will be quite content to keep her and look after her for some time." And if that won't do--"I know a man who would be only too happy to have you for a son-in-law; but his daughter is only eleven; she is an only child, however, and she will be _very_ rich. You know, _mon ami_, I desire your happiness above all things; how to procure it--there lies the chief interest of my life." This notion of things, more or less disguised, was to Julie customary and familiar; and it was no more incompatible in her with the notions and standards of high sentiment, such as she might be supposed to have derived from her parents, than it is in the Latin races generally.