She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. "Well, how can
we help it if you _will_ be a case?" And then as her tone but visibly
darkened his wonder: "What we've set our hearts on is saving the
picture."

"What you've set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight
against me?"

But she persisted without heat. "What we've set our hearts on is working
for England."

"And pray who in the world's 'England,'" he cried in his stupefaction,
"unless I am?"

"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that's all we _want_ you to be! I
mean"--she didn't fear firmly to force it home--"in the real, the right,
the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours."

"'Ours'?"--he couldn't but again throw back her word at her. "Isn't it,
damn you, just _in_ ours--?"

"No, no," she interrupted--"not in _ours!_" She smiled at him still,
though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.

But he glared as at a senseless juggle. "What and who the devil are you
talking about? What are 'we,' the whole blest lot of us, pray, but
the best and most English thing in the country: people walking--and
riding!--straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all
the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting
others to mind theirs?" So he let her "have" the stout sound truth, as
it were--and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have
made her reel. "You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be
thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly
lot of us, take us together--make us numerous enough without any foreign
aid or mixture: if that's what I understand you to mean!"

"You don't understand me at all--evidently; and above all I see you
don't want to!" she had the bravery to add, "By 'our' sense of what's
due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble's and mine--and
nobody's else at all; since, as I tell you, it's only with him I've
talked."

It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque
measure of the scandal he faced. "So that 'you and Mr. Crimble'
represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and
duties of our house?"

Well, she was too earnest--as she clearly wished to let him see--to mind
his perversion of it. "I express to you the way we feel."

"It's most striking to hear, certainly, what you express"--he
had positively to laugh for it; "and you speak of him,