. One can't mention her!"
Grace responded.

"It's better not to mention her, but to leave it alone."

"Yet he never mentions her of himself."

"In some cases that's supposed to show that people like people--though
of course something more's required to prove it," Lady Agnes continued
to meditate. "Sometimes I think he's thinking of her, then at others I
can't fancy _what_ he's thinking of."

"It would be awfully suitable," said Grace, biting her roll.

Her companion had a pause, as if looking for some higher ground to put
it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the
observation: "Of course he must like her--he has known her always."

"Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him," Grace opined.

"Poor Julia!" Lady Agnes almost wailed; and her tone suggested that she
knew more about that than she was ready to state.

"It isn't as if she wasn't clever and well read," her daughter went on.
"If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her being so
interested in politics, in everything that he is."

"Ah what Nick is--that's what I sometimes wonder!"

Grace eyed her parent in some despair: "Why, mother, isn't he going to
be like papa?" She waited for an answer that didn't come; after which
she pursued: "I thought you thought him so like him already."

"Well, I don't," said Lady Agnes quietly.

"Who is then? Certainly Percy isn't."

Lady Agnes was silent a space. "There's no one like your father."

"Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition:
"It would be so jolly for all of us--she'd be so nice to us."

"She's that already--in her way," said Lady Agnes conscientiously,
having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much good does it do her!"
And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before.

"It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I
think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate keep other
women off."

"Don't meddle--you're very clumsy," was her mother's not particularly
sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are beautiful, and
there are others who are clever and rich."

"Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her fortune
would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her for it."

"If he does he won't," said Lady Agnes a trifle obscurely.

"Yes, that's what's so charming. And he could do anything then, couldn't
he?"

"Well, your father had no fortune to speak