“Really?” she said. “She is really going to do it? To take a situation! She wants to be independent and ‘live her own life!’ What a joke—for a girl of mine!” She was either really amused or chose to seem so. “What do _you_ think of it?” she asked when she stopped laughing. Her eyes had curiosity in them. “I like it,” he answered. “Of course. I ought to have remembered that you helped her to an Early Victorian duchess. She’s one without a flaw—the Dowager Duchess of Darte. The most conscientiously careful mother couldn’t object. It’s almost like entering into the kingdom of heaven—in a dull way.” She began to laugh again as if amusing images rose suddenly before her. “And what does the Duchess think of it?” she said after her laughter had ceased again. “How does she reconcile herself to the idea of a companion whose mother she wouldn’t have in her house?” “We need not enter into that view of the case. You decided some years ago that it did not matter to you whether Early Victorian duchesses included you in their visiting lists or did not. More modern ones do I believe—quite beautiful and amusing ones.” “But for that reason I want this one and those like her. They would bore me, but I want them. I want them to come to my house and be polite to me in their stuffy way. I want to be invited to their hideous dinner parties and see them sitting round their tables in their awful family jewels ‘talking of the sad deaths of kings.’ That’s Shakespeare, you know. I heard it last night at the theatre.” “Why do you want it?” Coombe inquired. “When I ask you why you show your morbid interest in Robin, you say you don’t know. I don’t know—but I do want it.” She suddenly flushed, she even showed her small teeth. For an extraordinary moment she looked like a little cat. “Robin will hare it,” she cried, grinding a delicate fist into the palm on her knee. “She’s not eighteen and she’s a beauty and she’s taken up by a perfectly decent old duchess. She’ll have _everything!_ The Dowager will marry her to someone important. You’ll help,” she turned on him in a flame of temper. “You are capable of marrying her yourself!” There was a a brief but entire silence. It was broken by his saying, “She is not capable of marrying _me_.” There was brief but entire silence again, and it was he who again broke it, his manner at once cool and reasonable. “It is better not to exhibit this kind of feeling. Let us be quite frank. There are few things you feel more strongly than that you do not want your daughter in the house. When she was a child you told me that you detested the prospect of having her on your hands. She is being disposed of in the most easily explained and enviable manner.”