“How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?” Rosy cried. “Lord, how you give me away!” laughed her brother. “Daughters of earls, wives of princes—I’ve only to pick.” “I don’t speak of the Princess so long as there’s a Prince. But if you haven’t seen that Lady Aurora’s a beautiful, wonderful exception and quite unlike any one else in all the wide world—well, all I can say is that _I_ have.” “I thought it was your opinion,” Paul objected, “that the swells should remain swells and the high ones keep their place.” “And pray would she lose hers if she were to marry you?” “Her place at Inglefield certainly,” he answered as lucidly as if his sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness. “Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?” “Surely you appear to think so from the way you always question her about it.” “Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any madder,” Rosy continued. “They’ve given her up, and if she were to marry you——” “If she were to marry me they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,” Paul broke in. She flinched a moment, then said serenely: “Oh I don’t care for that!” “You ought to, to be consistent, though possibly she shouldn’t, admitting that she wouldn’t. You’ve more imagination than logic—which of course for a woman is quite right. That’s what makes you say that her ladyship’s in affliction because I go to a place she herself goes to without the least compulsion.” “She goes to keep you off,” said Rosy with decision. “To keep me off?” “To interpose with the Princess—and in a sense to interfere against her. To be nice to her and conciliate her, so she mayn’t take you.” “Has she told you any such rigmarole as that?” Paul inquired, this time staring a little. “Do I need to be told things to know them? I’m not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” Rosy answered with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear she was capable of wizardry. “You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the young man returned. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a little less poor.” “Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.” “She knows I’m not helpless so long as you’re about the place, and that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.” “She wants to assist me to assist you then!” the girl exclaimed with the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused: it was a spirit that seemed of a sudden, in argument, to mock at her own contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you’re plotting and working and waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.” “My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She couldn’t if she would.”