“That is very nice of you, but there are other people in it,” she replied. He waited mutely to hear more. She sent some cigarette smoke across his eyes. “I mean you to marry your daughter to my brother.” He was silent. The thought was not new to his own mind; he had felt sure that she would desire it; but to himself it presented no attractions; he did not understand the antiquity and purity of the Courcy blood, and his own ambitions for his heiress ranged in much loftier spheres. “Why don’t you answer?” said Mouse, beginning to feel offence. “I should have thought you would have been overjoyed.” “They don’t know each other,” he objected feebly. “What has that to do with it? When you and I settle a thing that thing has to be done. Ronnie and your daughter were made in heaven for each other; they are both awfully stiff, intensely disagreeable, and preëminently virtuous. There’d be no more cakes and ale in our world if those two could reform it.” Mr. Massarene was still mute; he did not at all know what to say; at last he asked humbly if Lord Hurstmanceaux had said anything on the subject. “I haven’t consulted him,” she replied, this time with genuine candor. “I never consult people when I am acting for their good, and my brother never talks unless he lectures somebody. This thing has to be done, Billy. You know when I say a thing I mean it.” “But you laugh at my daughter,” he said with hesitation. “Oh, I laugh at everybody,” said Mouse. “People are made to be laughed at. There’s something ridiculous in everyone if you only look for it. Your daughter seems ridiculous to me because she gives herself goody-goody airs, which nobody has nowadays; she looks as if she were always doing penance for your ill-gotten riches.” This shaft hit the gold of fact so neatly in the eye that William Massarene colored angrily under his dull skin. But his rage was against his daughter rather than against his tormentor. Why could not Katherine look and act like other young women of her time? “Yes, I know,” said Mouse, answering his unspoken reflections. “It must be very annoying to have a perpetual monitress in one’s own daughter, and of course you couldn’t make your millions with clean hands; nobody can; but society gives you lots of soap and water after you’ve made them, so what does it matter? Besides, a daughter shouldn’t look as if she were always saying, ‘Out, damned spot,’ as Ellen Terry does. However, that is just the kind of thing that will please Ronald. He will think it such an admirable spirit in her to despise your ill-gotten gold.” “Perhaps he would not require a dowry of dirty money with her, then?” said Mr. Massarene, allowing for one instant the natural sarcastic shrewdness in him to escape. Mouse was for the moment discomfited; she had never seen this unpleasant side of him before. Then, with her most insolent audacity, she blew some cigarette smoke over to where he sat.