“That’s all your confounded modesty. A man of six feet four can afford to be modest. All this discontent of mine arises from intense self-appreciation. The fact is, I have something of the ridiculous sentimental schoolgirl notion of being ‘loved for myself alone,’ isn’t that the expression? And it chafes me to think, now that my people are forever worrying me to get married, that there is nothing about me but my money and my position to make a girl care for me. Absurd, isn’t it?--and rather _bourgeois_ to cherish these conventional notions about marriage. But I have no doubt I shall live them down, and within the next year or so shall lead to the altar, at St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, or St. Margaret’s, Westminster, quite the conventional young English lady, fair-haired, gray-eyed, pink-skinned, with a waist squeezed into the smallest possible breathing compass, and a train of brocade carried by two dressed-up little boys, and from six to ten bridesmaids, all equally well-born and well-looking, who would all have been equally ready to marry my name and position if I had asked them, unless any other man with more to offer had made a higher bid for their valuable affections.” He spoke in hard, level tones, but Hilary, who had been Lord Carthew’s chum at Oxford, and both knew and understood him, realized by the slight nervous twitching of the speaker’s eyes and eyebrows how much of truth and of genuine feeling lay under this pretence of cynical indifference. Very few people thoroughly understood Claud Viscount Carthew. Great things had been expected of him during his University career, where he had distinguished himself by his brilliant acquirements as much as by his notable eccentricities. In politics he was theoretically a radical of radicals, but Hilary, one of the very few men of his time with whom he was really intimate, understood quite well the intensity of the pride which was masked under an affectation of socialistic doctrines. The Earl of Northborough, a powerful and prominent Conservative peer, trusted to time to cure his only son of his levelling tendencies, and was strongly desirous of seeing him married to some lady in his own rank of life, who might be trusted to tone down Lord Carthew’s idiosyncracies.