"Pardon me," said Sir Piers, with a grim laugh. "I retired because I had a faultless wife but unfortunately no genius. I shall therefore watch your friend's triumph or failure--for his position would seem to be precisely the reverse of my own--with peculiar sympathy."
"Ah! I fear you are rather heartless," exclaimed Sara. "For a man to have gone so far as Orange, and to know that perhaps--I say, perhaps--he can hope no higher because he made a fool of himself about a woman!"
"You speak as though it were a romantic marriage--a question of love."
"Of course," said the young lady softly. "It is a great passion."
"Well, after all," observed Harding, who was not insensible himself to Sara's delightfulness, "the British public is absurdly fond of a love-match. They adore a sentimental Prime Minister. They want to see him either marrying for love, or jilted in his youth for a richer man. These things enlist the popular sympathy. What made Henry Fox? His elopement with Lady Caroline Lennox."
"To be sure," said Reckage--"to be sure. That's a point."
"It is a compliment to the sex," continued Harding, "when a great man is taken captive by a pretty face. Men, too, rally round a Lochinvar. Such an evidence of heart--or folly, if you prefer to call it so--is also an evidence of disinterestedness. So, on the whole, I cannot follow your objections to the new Mrs. Orange."
"You have been away so long," said Garrow fussily, "that you have forgotten our prejudices. Orange himself, to begin with, has something mysterious in his origin. They say he is French--related to the old French aristocracy; but the less one says in England about foreign pedigrees the better. All that of itself is against him, and Mrs. Orange, it seems, is more or less French, or Austrian, too. We can't help regarding them as foreigners, and I always distrust foreigners in politics. Why should they care for England? I ask myself."
"Have I made myself clearer?" asked Garrow. "I can afford to speak. My own wife was a Russian. But I was not in political life, and she was an Ambassador's daughter."
"You think you would feel more sure of Orange's patriotic instinct if he had chosen an Englishwoman?" said Reckage.
"I am bound to say that he would have shown discretion in settling down with one of our simple-hearted Saxon girls."