But Jerry and his flirtation was not Lady Mary’s object. Alix began to see that her interest in herself was more disinterested than that. She was making her way, through smoking, and riding, and Marigold, to other topics. The topic she was really coming to was Giles, and she wanted to find out just how fond Alix was of him, and just how far went her commitments to him and to his family. Alix fancied, watching her, that she had a habit of playing patience when she wanted to say special things to you and to keep them from seeming special. “I don’t wonder at their taking you in as you say they have,” she remarked, when Alix expressed her sense of gratitude to the Bradleys. “Their brother, you know; what you and your mother had done for him. Giles told me about that last night.—And then you are a nice young person in yourself, Alix. One might like having you about.” “But it is not because I am nice that they have me,” Alix demurred. “And even if they did not like me so much they would take me in.” “Because of him?” “Yes. Because he was so fond of me. And not even quite that. It is more as if I had been a fox terrier he had left behind him. I mean it was like that at the beginning. They would have taken it in and cared for it always, even if it had not been a very nice one.” Lady Mary laughed. “Well, you _are_ a very nice one. I liked Giles’s mother that day in Oxford. She is very earnest, isn’t she?” “Yes. And very good.” “But she hasn’t much sense of humour?” “She is so busy all the time,” said Alix. “When one is so very busy taking care of people, there is not much time for humour. But she can be quite playful; like a young girl.” “I can’t see her being playful,” said Lady Mary. “Just as I can’t see her with her hair waved or her nose powdered. I don’t suppose she’s ever powdered her nose, or rouged her lips, or had her hair waved, has she?” “It would not go with her type,” said Alix. “There is a natural ripple in her hair, and her nose is of that pale dull sort that does not need powder.” Lady Mary was laughing again. “She’s a dear, of course. I saw that. And of course it isn’t her type. It isn’t his type either, is it; the pretty surfaces of life. Though _he_ has humour,” said Lady Mary, clipping down a card with soft deliberation and then shifting it. “Quite grim humour, too, I felt, once or twice. And I like that.” “I know no one who has a better sense of humour than Giles,” said Alix. “He is modest, too,” said Lady Mary. “And most middle-class young men are so overweeningly proud of their brains. We must all be proud of something, I suppose. One rather wishes he was not going to be buried in Oxford; but one feels, too, that it is his _métier_. He would not care a scrap about getting on or making a name in the world, and it’s such a happy life, that of the scholar. And if they don’t intend to marry, there’s no reason why they _should_ strive and strain like worldly people.” “But then they do marry,” Alix observed.