A vindictive dislike rose up in her against Jack. He was everything and she was nothing. This absurd rosy-faced monkey was lord of all; this little curly-headed imp in his man-o’-war suit was owner of everything and she of nothing, or of next to nothing; she felt an unreasonable and most unjust impatience at the very sight of his round laughing face and his sunny Correggio curls; and he avoided her as a puppy avoids a person who kicks it or scowls at it. “Can’t mammy be nasty? Oh, can’t she!” he said to his confidant Harry, who frowned and answered: “It’s blackguard of her if she’s nasty to _you_.” Harry himself was dull. On due consideration of his position he had felt no doubt whatever that he would have to marry Jack’s mother. Cocky had been his best friend; had Cocky’s duration of life depended on him the Seventh Duke of Otterbourne would have seen a green old age. “Bother it all,” thought the poor fellow, “and I must say something about it to her, I suppose. Oh, damn it! It’s telling a man in Newgate that he must settle the day for his own hanging!” His world supposed him still to be very much in love with Jack’s mother, but the prospect of being wedded to her appalled him. “My granny always said she would end in doing it,” he thought, recalling the prophetic wisdom of the aged Lady Luce. Men as a rule are not remarkable for tact, especially in personal matters which touch on the affections, and he had less of that valuable instinct than most people. Unaware that the lady of his destiny had mentally weighed him in the balance with the satin wheelbarrow, and found him wanting like the wheelbarrow in solidity, he was tormented by the feeling that he ought to speak to her on the subject and the indefinable reluctance which held him back from doing so. The position of a man who has to marry a lady with whom his name has long been associated before his world can never be agreeable. He is conscious of paying over again in gold for what he has long ago bought with paper. He is aware that lookers-on laugh in their sleeve. It requires the _beaux restes_ of a veritable passion, the perennial charm of an undying sympathy, to make the most loyal of lovers accept without flinching so conspicuous and questionable a position. To her, it is triumph as to the master builder when the gilded vane crowns the giddy height of the steeple. She shows that she has kept her man well in hand, and ridden him with science to the finish. Beside, the shyest of women always likes what compromises and compliments her. But the masculine mind is differently constituted; it sincerely dislikes being talked about, it still more dislikes to be laughed at, and when it is English, it is, on matters of the affections, uncommonly shy.