The decision cost her mother many tears, but it was the mildest ultimatum to which William Massarene could be brought. He only saw in his daughter a person who might have secured to him the one supreme honor for which his soul pined, and who had not done so, out of some squeamish, insolent, democratic, intolerable self-assertion. In sending her to pass a year in the family of Lord Framlingham, he not only removed her from his own sight, but placed her where he not unnaturally supposed that she would be surrounded by Conservative and aristocratic influences. Framlingham, however, though it had suited his pocket to accept his appointment, was a revolutionary at heart, and railed incessantly at the existence of his own order and his own privileges. He had heard of the discomfiture of the great personage, and chuckled over it, and welcomed the heroine of that rebuff with great cordiality to his marble palace, looking through the golden stems of palm-groves on to the Indian Ocean, where he was a funny incongruous figure himself, in his checked tweed clothes, with his red English face, his shining bald head, his eye-glass screwed into his left eye, and his clean-shaven lips shut close on a big cigar. “Did so right, Miss Massarene, did so right,” he said warmly to her, soon after her arrival. “Mustn’t say so, you know, as I’m one of Her Majesty’s servants, but I’m always deuced glad when any royalty gets a facer. Those people, you know, are like preserved meats in a tin case which has had all the air pumped out of it. They never get a chance of hearing the truth, nor of knowing what they look like to people who aren’t snobs. Almost everybody is a snob, you see. I should like to write a new ‘Book of Snobs.’ The species has grown a good deal since Thackeray’s days. It has developed like orchids or prize vegetables.” Framlingham, although an unpoetic-looking occupant of a marble palace in rose-gardens of the gorgeous East, was a person of delicate perceptions, high intelligence, and cultured mind. He took a great liking to this young woman, who quarreled with a lot which all the world envied her, and he pressed her to remain with his family when the year had passed; and she obtained permission to do so. Her mother was yearning for her return, but her father would willingly never have seen her face again. He was not a man who forgave. She was thinking of the scene with her father as she sat on the marble steps in the governor’s gardens, in the deep shade of a magnolia grove, absently listening to the chatter of the monkeys overhead. She felt that she had been in the right. She burned with shame whenever she remembered the eyes of the great gentleman luring upon her as he said, “I’ll dine with your father, if _you_ ask me.” And her father had not seen the meaning in those words; or had seen it, but would willingly have purchased the honor even at that price!