"Really! Understandings don't as a rule lead to marriage. Misunderstandings generally bring about those painful dislocations of life. But the idea struck me this evening--I hope needlessly--that I might after all have to take that richly gilt personage to my bosom as my son-in-law." "Mr Vanbrunt asked me to marry him yesterday, and I refused him." The Duke experienced a slight shock, tinged with relief. "Does your mother know?" he said at last in an awed voice. "Need you ask?" "Well, if she ever finds out, for goodness' sake let her inform me of the fact. Don't give me away, Anne, by letting out that I knew at the time. If she thought I was an accomplice of the crime--your refusal--really if she once got that idea into her head---- But next time she tackles Vanbrunt, perhaps he will tell her himself. Oh, heavens!" "I asked him not to mention it to her." The Duke sighed. "And so he really did propose at last. I thought your mother had choked him off. Most men would have been. Well, Anne, I'm glad you did not accept him. I don't hold with mixed marriages. In these days people talk as if class were nothing, and the fact of being well-born of no account. And, of course, it's a subject one can't discuss, because certain things, if put into words, sound snobbish at once. But they are true all the same. The middle classes have got it screwed into their cultivated heads that education levels class differences. It doesn't, but one can't say so. Not that Vanbrunt is educated, as I once told him." "Oh! come, father. I am sure you did not." "You are right, my dear. I did not. He said himself one day, in a moment of expansion, that he regretted that he had never had the chance of going to a public school, or the University, and I said the sort of life he had led was an education of a high order. So it is. That man has lived. Really when I come to think of it, I almost--no, I don't--Ahem! Associate freely with all classes, but marry in your own. That is what I say when no one is listening. By no one I mean of course yourself, my dear." Anne was silent. There had been days when she had felt that difference keenly though silently. Those days were past.