‘If you knew her surroundings, Sebastian, you would not be surprised, I assure you. Such a brother! With her high spirit, and rather strained ideas as to what is honourable and gentlemanly, it must be a bitter cross to her to have that brother constantly disgracing himself in one way or another.’ ‘Yes, that is true.’ ‘And her father and mother too----’ ‘Ha! what about them?’ ‘Her mother is a mere cipher--a handsome, helpless, vulgar woman; kind-hearted, but absolutely weak in intellect, and the father is a hard, coarse man, who bullies that unfortunate woman in a disgraceful manner. He is proud of his daughter, but in a tyrannical, despotic way. Fortunately for her (I may say it without boasting), he thinks me the best friend she could have, and places no restraint on her visits to me. Otherwise, she has not a congenial companion.’ ‘The benefit must have been immense to her,’ he said. ‘I wondered, after all I had heard of her family, how she came to be even so--well-behaved.’ ‘She ought to marry soon. She would soon calm down if she had a kind husband, whom she loved.’ Sebastian remarked drily that she had forcibly expressed her determination to eschew any such relationship. Mrs. Mallory shook her head, smiling with gentle pity. ‘So she may say, but her father has very different views for her. She would be very helpless, cast upon the world, with her beauty, her hasty disposition, and her large fortune.’ ‘Has she a fortune, then?’ he asked, with provoking indifference. ‘Sebastian, that young, warm-hearted girl, with all her enthusiasms and crotchets, ready to fall into the hands of any adventurer, will have at least a hundred thousand pounds.’ Mrs. Mallory spoke with solemn, impressive manner and tones. She was watching her son, who seemed to view the matter with a seriousness that promised well, for he stood, his hands folded behind him, his eyes fixed upon the carpet, profoundly silent and profoundly grave, till, looking up with a sudden, humorous smile, he said, ‘_Ma foi!_ The adventurer who won her, and her hundred thousand pounds, and her frantic ideas on women’s rights, and the execrations of all the other adventurers who had tried, and failed to win her--and her family, who must be most delightful people, I am sure--that adventurer would have driven the very hardest bargain that could well be imagined. I pity him, whoever he may be.... Good night, mother. You must excuse me; I have several things to do to-night. I have my business to learn, you know.’ CHAPTER XV. ‘“Do so,” said Socrates; “here is room by me.” ‘“Oh, Jupiter!” exclaimed Alcibiades, “what I endure from that man! He thinks to subdue every way.”’