erest of her prospective brother-in-law, she approached me on the
singular ground of the unencouraged sentiment I had entertained for her
sister. Pretty pink Maud had cast me out, but I appear to have passed in
the flurried little circle for a magnanimous youth. Pretty pink Maud,
so lovely then, before her troubles, that dusky Jane was gratefully
conscious of all she made up for, Maud Stannace, very literary too,
very languishing and extremely bullied by her mother, had yielded,
invidiously as it might have struck me, to Ray Limbert's suit, which
Mrs. Stannace was not the woman to stomach. Mrs. Stannace was seldom the
woman to do anything: she had been shocked at the way her children, with
the grubby taint of their father's blood (he had published pale Remains
or flat Conversations of _his_ father) breathed the alien air of
authorship. If not the daughter, nor even the niece, she was, if I am
not mistaken, the second cousin of a hundred earls and a great stickler
for relationship, so that she had other views for her brilliant child,
especially after her quiet one (such had been her original discreet
forecast of the producer of eighty volumes) became the second wife of an
ex-army-surgeon, already the father of four children. Mrs. Stannace had
too manifestly dreamed it would be given to pretty pink Maud to detach
some one of the hundred, who wouldn't be missed, from the cluster. It
was because she cared only for cousins that I unlearnt the way to
her house, which she had once reminded me was one of the few paths of
gentility I could hope to tread. Ralph Limbert, who belonged to nobody
and had done nothing--nothing even at Cambridge--had only the uncanny
spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her
younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn't commit the
indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and intensely
aggravated mother.

These things I learned from Jane Highmore, who, as if her books had been
babies (they remained her only ones) had waited till after marriage
to show what she could do and now bade fair to surround her satisfied
spouse (he took for some mysterious reason, a part of the credit) with a
little family, in sets of triplets, which properly handled would be the
support of his declining years. The young couple, neither of whom had
a penny, were now virtually engaged: the thing was subject to Ralph's
putting his hand on some regular employment. People mor