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.

In this affair Marsham had acted on one of the convictions with which he
had entered public life--that there is no greater help to a politician
than a distinguished, clever, and, if possible, beautiful wife.
Distinction, Radical though he was, had once seemed to him a matter of
family and "connection." But after the failure of his first attempt,
"family," in the ordinary sense, had ceased to attract him. Personal
breeding, intelligence, and charm--these, after all, are what the
politician who is already provided with money, wants to secure in his
wife; without, of course, any obvious disqualification in the way of
family history. Diana, as he had first met her among the woods at
Portofino, side by side with her dignified and gentlemanly father, had
made upon him precisely that impression of personal distinction of which
he was in search--upon his mother also.

The appearance and the accent, however, of the cousin had struck him
with surprise; nor was it till he was nearing Tallyn that he succeeded
in shaking off the impression. Absurd! Everybody has some relations that
require to be masked--like the stables, or the back door--in a skilful
arrangement of life. Diana, his beautiful, unapproachable Diana, would
soon, no doubt, be relieved of this young lady, with whom she