“How horrid you are, Ronald!” she said, while her lips quivered, partly with fear and partly with rage. “You won’t look at the young woman, and yet you set your back up like this. Oh, of course I can tell people that I was only joking. But it will be very disagreeable.” “You should bridle your tongue,” said Hurstmanceaux sternly, surprised himself to feel with what extreme irritation this story of hers had awakened in him. He could not and would not know Massarene’s heiress, but he admired her conduct in society; he admired most of all what others condemned in her, the contemptuous coldness and indifference of her manner, her brief replies, sometimes so cutting and caustic, her avoidance of all those whose high position made them sought by her parents, the unwavering coldness with which she resented all court paid to her. When he watched her in the world, he felt inclined to applaud as he would have applauded a fine innings at Lord’s or a hard-won race on the Thames. It seemed to him monstrous that his sister, because her matrimonial schemes had failed, should pursue with slander anyone so innocent and so much to be praised. William Massarene was in no haste to marry his daughter. His vanity would have impelled him to give her an unusual dower if she had married, and he did not care to cut so huge a slice out of his capital. Moreover, his ambitions, growing by what they fed on, became inordinate. No alliance seemed to him great enough. Besides, he thought often, the old woman might go to glory, and he might marry again and have sons. To his strength of purpose and vastness of reach the future--his future--seemed illimitable. She received a homage which nauseated, a flattery which disgusted, her. She knew that she was seen through the golden haze of her father’s reputation for wealth. “If I were deaf, or blind, or crooked,” she thought, “if I were diseased, or imbecile, or mutilated, there would not be one the less ready to worship and wed me out of all these throngs of wooers.” And very often her brief words cut them like a lash, and in her eyes, which were the hue of the darkest purple of a pansy, there came a flash of scorn whose cause those around her were too self-complacent to attribute aright.