“Indeed if you had thought at all on the subject, you might have made sure we should be here,” said Mrs. Curtis, and then she stooped forward and raised her head to whisper: “She is very pretty, Arthur, and of course you think her as nice as she is pretty. Would she like to be introduced to me?” “She must be now that you are here,” said Arthur, not with any great eagerness. He took her offer a great deal too easily as a matter of course, not as the distinguished kindness she intended it to be. But her curiosity had reached to a very high point, and there was a touch of kindness as well as of self-importance in the idea of being able to mediate in the family affairs. Besides Sir John Denham was chatting familiarly on the other side of the bride, whose looks in her Paris bonnet were unexceptionable; and Sir John Denham was a very useful man to know in Paris, and one before whom many doors opened. And though her husband grumbled and held back, her daughter was still more anxious than she was. “Oh, Arthur, how pretty she is!” Mary Curtis murmured to her cousin, while her mother made up her mind. It was Mary or some one like her who ought to have been elected to fill the post Nancy had secured, to become the future Lady Curtis. If that post had been filled up by competitive examination, as men’s situations are nowadays, no doubt Mary would have got it; and looking at it entirely as a public position without reference to Arthur (who after all was but a necessary adjunct, and not everything) Mary felt a lively interest, touched with doubt of her qualifications, in the successful candidate. She was anxious to inspect her, to have the satisfaction of feeling, which is a very general sentiment, that she herself could have done it better. Would this girl have the least idea how to behave in so important a post? Mary gave her mother little pushes and pinches to urge her on. “I hope you have taken her to see your mother, Arthur,” said Mrs. Curtis, “she is of course the first person to be thought of. Ah, you have not, you naughty boy! well, if you wish it I will go and speak to her before the music begins again. No, Mary, not you, you had better stay where you are. Papa will be vexed if we both go.”