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 He was Scotch; a clever Scotch journalist; very brilliant and excitable. I'm afraid he drank more than was good for him. Dick says it was because she made him so unhappy.'

'She was unfaithful to him?' Madame de Lamouderie suggested.

'Unfaithful! Dick's mother! Great Scott, no!' Jill had to laugh at the idea. 'She's a pattern of all the virtues. It was merely, I imagine, that his ways weren't her ways, and hers weren't his. He was a bohemian, and she was an American; of a very old family that she thinks a lot of. I always feel there's something to be said for her. She was only nineteen when she met him, on a steamer, when she was going back to America after being educated in a French convent. He was frightfully handsome and he carried her off her feet. But then he wanted her to stay off her feet, as it were; and she's not that sort of person. She needs to have her feet well on the ground. With as many roots as possible,' Jill laughed again, amused by her own simile. 'Well, she's got them now! She's married to a dismal, moth-eaten old baron and lives in a mouldy old château in Burgundy. And that is really what she likes. He's very bien né and bien pensant, and Dick's father was neither.'

'An American? Very rich, then? A millionaire?'

'Oh, no. She doesn't like millionaires. She likes old families.—American old families don't seem to mean much over here, do they?'

'They do not, indeed. One never hears of them. It