her traditions and her upbringing to lead--for having seen for a few
months what honest work is like. She is too handsome not to marry well:
let us only hope that Alice won't secure a duke for her. She will if she
can; and I--well, I haven't much opinion of dukes." And so with a laugh
and a shrug, Caspar Brooke returned to his work.

Lesley went upstairs to the drawing-room with burning cheeks and a lump
in her throat. She was offended by her father's manner towards her,
although she could not but acknowledge that in essentials he had seemed
wishful to be kind. And she knew that she had seemed ungracious and had
felt resentful. But the resentment, she assured herself, was all on her
mother's account. If he had treated Lady Alice as he had treated Lady
Alice's daughter--with hardly concealed contempt, with the scornful
indifference of one looking down from a superior height--Lesley did not
wonder that her mother had left him. It was a manner which had never
been displayed to her before, and she said to herself that it was
horribly discourteous. And the worst of it was that it did not seem to
be directed to herself alone: it included her friends the nuns, her
mother, her mother's family, and all the circle of aristocratic
relations to which she belonged. She was despised as part of the class
which he despised; and it was difficult for her to understand the
situation.

It would have been easier if she could have set her father down as a
mere boor, without refinement or intelligence; but there was one item in
her impression of him which she could not reconcile with a want of
culture. She was keenly sensitive to sound; and voices were important to
her in her judgment of acquaintances. Now, Caspar Brooke had a
delightful voice. It was low, musical, and finely modulated: his accent,
moreover, was particularly delicate and refined. Lesley had, without
knowing it, the same charmingly modulated intonation; and her father's
voice was instinctively familiar to her. People had often said that it
was hard to dislike a man with a voice like Caspar Brooke's; and Lesley
was not insensible to its fascination. No, he could not be a mere
insensate clod, with that pleasant and cultivated voice, she decided to
herself; but he might be something worse--a heartless man of the world,
who cared for nothing but himself and his own low ambitions: not a man
who was worthy to be the husband of a gentle, loving, highly-organized
woman like the daugh