“Surely it is all,” said Sir John, “you don’t think I would keep back anything, why should I? It’s all, and enough too, I think. A fellow like that whom we’ve all petted and spoiled, thinking of nothing but his allowance! It’s disappointing, that it certainly is. When one thinks that’s Arthur!” said his father, his lower lip quivering with unusual emotion, yet something that was intended for a smile. “Oh don’t make him out any worse than he is,” said Lady Curtis, “I can see that girl’s hand through all.” Now a more gratuitous assertion than this could not be. Arthur had written when away from Nancy altogether in the writing room of the English Club. She had known nothing about what he was doing, and still less did she know that he had made up his mind not to struggle with his fate any longer, but to let her go back to her congenial soil, which would secure at least no further encounters with people of his own class, even when met in the recent accidental way. He could not, he felt, risk anything like this again. He had not strength for it. It was better to yield to her than to wear himself out with such paltry miseries; but up to this moment even Nancy herself did not know of his decision. Lady Curtis however did not know this, nor did the despair in Arthur’s mind ever occur to her, or the state of severance between him and his wife which had really existed when these two letters were written. It seemed to her that they were full of one spirit, and that Nancy had got the entire command and put her own unregulated soul into her husband. Dear as he was to his mother, the bold figure of this girl whom she had never seen, seem to rise up and obliterate her son before Lady Curtis’s eyes--obliterate him intellectually and morally--so that all she saw was a shadow of Nancy, not the reality of Arthur. Sir John did not take this figurative view. He took what he saw for granted, exercising no spirit of divination. He was wounded not to sharp pain like his wife, but with a heavy sense of evil. This was all Arthur wanted, not to be his father’s right hand man, to help him (for, privately, Sir John was of opinion that he had a great deal to do) to become the real head of the estate, understanding everything as his father had wished; but only to have his allowance increased! that was all. It did not give Sir John a less pang in his matter of fact way than it did his wife, but this was the low level of interpretation by which he explained to himself the boy who had been his pride.