iving of money is never successful. But I never
thought you would have got it out of her mind."

"Don't flatter me," he said; "it is not I that have got it out of her
mind. It is life and all the novelties in it--and small Tom, who is more
of a magician than I am----"

"Oh, the baby!" said the dowager, with the indifference of a woman who
has never had a child, and cannot conceive why a little sprawling
tadpole in long clothes should make such a difference. "Yes, I suppose
that's a novelty," she said, "to be mother of a bit of a thing like that
naturally turns a girl's head. It is inconceivable the airs they give
themselves, as if there was nothing so wonderful in creation. And so far
as I can see you are just as bad, though you ought to know better, Tom."

"Oh, just as bad," he said, with his large laugh. "I never had a share
in anything so wonderful. If you only could see the superiority of this
bit of a thing to all other things about him----"

"Oh! spare me," cried Lady Randolph the elder, holding up her hands. "Of
course I don't undervalue the importance of an heir to the property,"
she said in a different tone. "I have heard enough about it to be pretty
sensible of that."

This the Dowager said with a slight tone of bitterness, which indeed was
comprehensible enough: for she had suffered much in her day from the
fact that no such production had been possible to her. Had it been so,
her nephew who stood by her would not (she could scarcely help
reflecting with some grudge against Providence) have been the great man
he now was, and no child of his would have mattered to the family. Lady
Randolph was a very sensible woman, and had long been reconciled to the
state of affairs, and liked her nephew, whom she had been the means of
providing for so nobly; and she was glad there was a baby; still, for
the sake of her own who had never existed, she resented the
self-exaltation of father and mother over this very common and in no way
extraordinary phenomenon of a child.

Sir Tom laughed again with a sense of superiority, which was in itself
somewhat ludicrous; but as nobody is clear-sighted in their own
concerns, he was quite unconscious of this. His laugh nettled Lady
Randolph still more. She said, with a certain disdain in her tone,--

"And so you think you have sailed triumphantly over all that
difficulty--thanks to your charms and the baby's, and are going to hear
nothing of it any more?"

Sir Tom felt that he