"Well, my dear George," she said. "Here's the first of them gone. I hope you're as pleased about it as you ought to be. You won't like losing the child, but you couldn't expect to keep her with you always, and she's married just the right sort of man." "Wonderful powers of observation you have, Mary," he said. "I shouldn't like to disappoint you in any way, and I'm glad you're pleased with me." "Ah now you're being sarcastic, but I'm sure I don't know what for. I'll behave handsomely to you, and admit that you turned out to be right a year ago, and all the rest of us turned out to be wrong, including B herself, apparently. I've never seen a girl more devoted to the man she's going to marry. Perfectly beautiful, I call it. She hasn't got a thought for anybody else. She'll make him a splendid wife, and I must say you deserve a great deal of credit for the way in which you've brought up _all_ your girls. They have learnt to be everything to you, and I expect you've wanted a good deal of humouring, as all men do, though it doesn't show on the surface. If they have been able to manage you so well, they'll know how to manage their husbands, which most of us have to learn after we're married to them. I'm sure the trouble I had first of all with my dear old James, before I got into his ways--" "Or he got into yours," suggested Grafton. She allowed herself to be diverted. "Now, George," she said, "that's a thoroughly man's speech. _Is_ James happy or is he not?" "The Bank Rate is very satisfactory at present," said Grafton. "I think both James and I are as happy as we can expect to be." Lady Handsworth also admitted handsomely that his opposition to Lassigny had borne good fruit. "This is a more satisfactory marriage than that would have been, even if M. de Lassigny had been everything you could have wished him to be," she said. "I am glad it has come about so quickly, and so naturally, George. I did say to you, I remember, that her first love meant so much to a girl that if she were disappointed in it no other love could be quite the same to her. But you seem to have judged more rightly than I even over that, which is more of a woman's question than a man's. I suppose it is because you have always had such sympathy with your girls. I confess that I should never have expected to come to Beatrix's wedding within a few months and find her so entirely cured of that other affair. She _was_ very deeply in love, I know, and in the nicest sweetest sort of way; but she seems still more deeply in love now." "Well, you see she's found the right fellow," said Grafton. "He's worth what she gives him. The other fellow wasn't; but I don't think she'd really given him everything; she only thought she had."