One day, after luncheon, when a bevy of girls were grouped round the piano in the billiard-room, Lizzie Fermor--who indulged in the wildest latitude of discourse--was audacious enough to ask Miss Granger how she would like her father to marry again. The faultless Sophia elevated her well-marked eyebrows with a look of astonishment that ought to have frozen Miss Fermor. The eyebrows were as hard and as neatly pencilled as the shading in Miss Granger's landscapes. "Marry again!" she repeated, "papa!--if you knew him better, Miss Fermor, you would never speculate upon such a thing. Papa will never marry again." "Has he promised you that?" asked the irrepressible Lizzie. "I do not require any promise from him. I know him too well to have the slightest doubt upon the subject. Papa might have married brilliantly, again and again, since I was a little thing." (It was rather difficult to fancy Miss Granger a "little thing" in any stage of her existence.) "But nothing has ever been more remote from his ideas than a second marriage. I have heard people regret it." "_You_ have not regretted it, of course." "I hope I know my duty too well, to wish to stand between papa and his happiness. If it had been for his happiness to marry--a person of a suitable age and position, of course--I should not have considered my own feelings in the matter." "Well, I suppose not," replied Lizzie, rather doubtfully; "still it is nice to have one's father all to oneself--to say nothing of being an heiress. And the worst of the business is, that when a widower of your papa's age does take it into his head to marry, he is apt to fall in love with some chit of a girl." Miss Granger stared at the speaker with a gaze as stony as Antigone herself could have turned upon any impious jester who had hinted that Oedipus, in his blindness and banishment, was groping for some frivolous successor to Jocasta. "My father in love with a girl!" she exclaimed. "What a very false idea you must have formed of his character, Miss Fermor, when you can suggest such an utter absurdity!" "But, you see, I wasn't speaking of Mr. Granger, only of widowers in general. I have seen several marriages of that kind--men of forty or fifty throwing themselves away, I suppose one ought to say, upon girls scarcely out of their teens. In some cases the marriage seems to turn out well enough; but of course one does sometimes hear of things not going on quite happily."