ding might in the actual case suggest too
much that he _was_ to marry her. You could quarrel with your wife
because there were compensations--for her; but you mightn't be prepared
to offer these compensations as prepayment for the luxury of
quarrelling.

It was not that such a luxury wouldn't be considerable, our young man
none the less thought as Julia Dallow's fine head poised itself before
him again; a high spirit was of course better than a mawkish to be
mismated with, any day in the year. She had much the same colour as her
brother, but as nothing else in her face was the same the resemblance
was not striking. Her hair was of so dark a brown that it was commonly
regarded as black, and so abundant that a plain arrangement was required
to keep it in natural relation to the rest of her person. Her eyes were
of a grey sometimes pronounced too light, and were not sunken in her
face, but placed well on the surface. Her nose was perfect, but her
mouth was too small; and Nick Dormer, and doubtless other persons as
well, had sometimes wondered how with such a mouth her face could have
expressed decision. Her figure helped it, for she appeared tall--being
extremely slender--yet was not; and her head took turns and positions
which, though a matter of but half an inch out of the common this way or
that, somehow contributed to the air of resolution and temper. If it had
not been for her extreme delicacy of line and surface she might have
been called bold; but as it was she looked refined and quiet--refined by
tradition and quiet for a purpose. And altogether she was beautiful,
with the gravity of her elegant head, her hair like the depths of
darkness, her eyes like its earlier clearing, her mouth like a rare pink
flower.

Peter said he had not taken a private room because he knew Biddy's
tastes; she liked to see the world--she had told him so--the curious
people, the coming and going of Paris. "Oh anything for Biddy!" Julia
replied, smiling at the girl and taking her place. Lady Agnes and her
elder daughter exchanged one of their looks, and Nick exclaimed jocosely
that he didn't see why the whole party should be sacrificed to a
presumptuous child. The presumptuous child blushingly protested she had
never expressed any such wish to Peter, upon which Nick, with broader
humour, revealed that Peter had served them so out of stinginess: he had
pitchforked them together in the public room because he wouldn't go to
the expense of a