More than once the Press announced her betrothal to some great personage, but on the following morning was always forced to retract the statement as a snail draws in its horns. To her mother it seemed heathenish and unnatural that a young woman should not wish to be “settled”; she thought the mischief came from the education Katherine had received, reading books that had even a different alphabet. “You want all the hideous vulgarity of a fashionable wedding, my dear mother,” said Katherine. “If ever I should marry I assure you I shall wear a white cotton gown and go alone to some remote village church.” “My dear, how can you say such things? It is quite shocking to hear you,” said the mistress of Harrenden House, infinitely distressed. “Pray set your mind at ease,” said her daughter. “I shall never marry, for the best of all reasons that no man whom I could respect would ever marry me.” “Not respect ye! How can you say such things? You’re the daughter of one of the richest men in the whole world, and he’ll be noble as well, he says, afore he goes to Kingdom Come.” The younger woman lifted her head, like a forest-doe who hears the crack of a carter’s whip. “To belong to the Peerage is not necessarily to belong to the nobility; and you may belong to the nobility without being included in the Peerage. Sir Edward Coke laid down that law. Surely, my dear mother, you cannot for a moment pretend that if my father be given a peerage he will become noble?” Katherine Massarene knew that she might as well have spoken to the Clodion on the staircase, as said these reasonable things to her mother; but now and then she could not wholly keep back the expression of the scorn of her father’s ambitions which moved her--ambitions, in her eyes, so peurile and so poor. “Who was Edward Coke?” said Mrs. Massarene sullenly. “The greatest lawyer England has ever seen. The greatest exponent of Common Law.” “Well, then, I think he might have known better than to deny as his sovereign can make a gentleman of anybody if so be she choose,” said her mother doggedly. “You might as well say that the sovereign can cure the king’s evil!” “Well, they say she _can_?” “Oh, my dear mother! Can you live in the world and keep such superstitions?” “You’ve no belief in you!” “I at least believe enough in true nobility to hold that it is a gift of race and breeding beyond purchase, and uncreatable by any formula.” “If the Queen makes your father a lord, a lord he will be with the best of them.” “She can make him a lord; she cannot make him either noble or gentle. His nobility will be a lie, as his armorial bearings are already.” “That’s a cruel thing to say, Kathleen!” “It is the truth.” “Why do I try to reason with her?” she thought. “One might as well try to persuade the stone supporters on the gateway?”