Grace remarked to her
brother in a tone of some triumph.

"My dear, they're all lovely. George Dallow's judgement was so sure, he
was incapable of making a mistake," Nicholas Dormer returned.

"I don't see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful," said Lady Agnes.

"My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry he's good enough for
us to talk of."

"She did him a very great honour."

"I daresay, but he was not unworthy of it. No such enlightened
collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our time."

"You think too much of beautiful objects!" Lady Agnes sighed.

"I thought you were just now lamenting that I think too little."

"It's very nice--his having left Julia so well off," Biddy interposed
soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle.

"He treated her _en grand seigneur_, absolutely," Nick went on.

"He used to look greasy, all the same"--Grace bore on it with a dull
weight. "His name ought to have been Tallow."

"You're not saying what Julia would like, if that's what you are trying
to say," her brother observed.

"Don't be vulgar, Grace," said Lady Agnes.

"I know Peter Sherringham's birthday!" Biddy broke out innocently, as a
pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into Nick's arm, to signify
her readiness to go with him, while she scanned the remoter reaches of
the garden as if it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in
some such sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter.

"He's too much older than you, my dear," Grace answered without
encouragement.

"That's why I've noticed it--he's thirty-four. Do you call that too
old? I don't care for slobbering infants!" Biddy cried.

"Don't be vulgar," Lady Agnes enjoined again.

"Come, Bid, we'll go and be vulgar together; for that's what we are, I'm
afraid," her brother said to her. "We'll go and look at all these low
works of art."

"Do you really think it's necessary to the child's development?" Lady
Agnes demanded as the pair turned away. And then while her son, struck
as by a challenge, paused, lingering a moment with his little sister on
his arm: "What we've been through this morning in this place, and what
you've paraded before our eyes--the murders, the tortures, all kinds of
disease and indecency!"

Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised him, but
as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he quickly
guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of animati