His Grace — page 282: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

276 HIS GRACE. but now I could no longer conceal from him the fact that he owned a property the value of which might be very great indeed. He behaved much more coolly and sensibly than I had expected. He gave me full powers to make such arrangements as might seem advisable to me, merely remarking that, although he should like very well to be a rich man, he was perfectly happy as a poor one. He wrote from Venice, where he stated that Nora and he were having a glorious time of it. If they didn’t spend the winter there, they would spend it in “some such place,” he supposed. For his own part, he was game to go to any place that Nora might fancy. How long this mood would have lasted, or into what sort of a poor man Hurstbourne would have developed if he had remained poor, it is difficult to say. The problem can never now be removed from the calm sphere of hypothesis ; for it appears that there is coal enough beneath that waste land of his to keep the fires of his descendants alight formany generations to come. Nora and he returned home early in the ensuing year, by which time there was no longer any question of letting the abode of his ancestors. They were met, of course, by an enthusiastic welcome on the part of their tenantry and other dependents, which was, I hope, as much a tribute to their personal merits as to their. im- proved circumstances. But, charitable as I am, I cannot go quite so far as to believe that Nora’s un- assisted merits would ever have placed her upon that pinnacle in high society which she now occupies with so much ease and elegance. We live in an age when aristocracy is almost, if not yet altogether, synonymous with wealth, and the philosophic bystander must be Gomicboo “S (E(@)