Their devotion was a
strange mixture of love and selfishness; at any rate, Alicia could
always feel, and did always feel, that she was playing her family's game
as well as her own.
Her own game, of course, came first. She was not a beauty, in the sense
in which Diana Mallory was a beauty; and of that fact she had been
perfectly aware after her first apparently careless glance at the
new-comer of the afternoon. But she had points that never failed to
attract notice: a free and rather insolent carriage, audaciously
beautiful eyes, a general roundness and softness, and a
grace--unfailing, deliberate, and provocative, even in actions, morally,
the most graceless--that would have alone secured her the "career" on
which she was bent.
Of her mental qualities, one of the most profitable was a very shrewd
power of observation. As she swept slowly along the corridor, which
overlooked the hall at Tallyn, none of the details of the house were
lost upon her. Tallyn was vast, ugly--above all, rich. Henry Marsham,
the deceased husband of Lady Lucy and father of Oliver and Mrs.
Fotheringham, had made an enormous fortune in the Iron Trade of the
north, retiring at sixty that he might enjoy some of those pleasures of
life for which business had left him too little time.
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