Page:The council of seven.djvu/126

 *vincible optimist in all matters relating to herself and family—she had heard, in fact, of a nice young heiress in the next county, and John, although his "radicalism" annoyed her deeply, being his mother's son had merely to cast the handkerchief.

Poor Helen was to learn in the course of the evening that it would not be with the consent of her hostess if she ever became Mrs. John Endor. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb. John simply couldn't afford to marry under ten thousand a year; he had a little, only a very little, of his own, and Wyndham was one of those ramshackle old places, although good of its kind, that was really so expensive to keep up.

John's destiny, so to speak, was cut and dried—let there be no doubt on that score—although his politics, his general outlook, his "isms" were crosses for his mother's old age. Indeed, the attitude of Lady Elizabeth to her distinguished son was that of an entirely responsible barndoor hen who, by a whim of the gods, has hatched a peacock. The ideas in which he trafficked were so much colored moonshine, for which she had simply no use at all. She was greatly surprised that Eton and Oxford had failed to knock such pernicious nonsense out of him. Ne sutor ultra crepidam was the motto she believed in. Old as she was, and rather too infirm to wield a stick with the vigor of her prime—the irony of the matter was, that a Spartan parent had always bestowed great pains upon his youth!*