The danger with him, of course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple and popular enough." Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.
"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it ?" he said to her, but in a lower voice, and sitting down beside her.
Mrs.Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her.

It was inevitable, of course--youth and beauty rule the world.

But the mother, under no spell herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the lowering of standards involved.
"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question, fidgeting the papers under her hand.

Then his curious confessor's gift, his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all before him, told upon her.
"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that must come," she added hurriedly.

"This is all about details, palliatives.