Mallory?--the seclusion in which Diana had
been brought up? The idea was most unwelcome, but the sight of Fanny
Merton had inevitably provoked it. And it led on to a good many other
ideas and speculations of a mingled sort connected, now with Diana, now
with recollections, pleasant and unpleasant, of the eight or ten years
which had preceded his first sight of her.
For Oliver Marsham was now thirty-six, and he had not reached that age
without at least one serious attempt--quite apart from any passages with
Alicia Drake--to provide himself with a wife. Some two years before this
date he had proposed to a pretty girl of great family and no money, with
whom he supposed himself ardently in love. She, after some hesitation,
had refused him, and Marsham had had some reason to believe that in
spite of his mother's great fortune and his own expectations, his
_provenance_ had not been regarded as sufficiently aristocratic by the
girl's fond parents. Perhaps had he--and not Lady Lucy--been the owner
of Tallyn and its L18,000 a year, things might have been different. As
it was, Marsham had felt the affront, as a strong and self-confident man
was likely to feel it; and it was perhaps in reaction from it that he
had allowed himself those passages with Alicia Drake which had, at
least, soothed his self-love.
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