And yet--why, she was no great lady at all.
She was the daughter of his old General Kervick--the
necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman,
with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat,
who did what he was told on the Board without a question,
for a pitiful three hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter,
and she also was poor. Plowden had said so.
Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving
her from her father's importunities? He must have had
it very much at heart, to have invented the roundabout
plan of getting the old gentleman a directorship.
But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name.
It would have been his sister, of course, who was
evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who gave him
the hint to help the General to something if he could.
And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money
save by directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it.
Plowden had remembered Kervick's name, when the chance
arose to give the old boy a leg up, and then had clean
forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
his liking for Plowden.
He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought,
to where the peer sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair
before the fire.
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