Rex gave himself to the preparations with gusto. He bought her a ring, not, as she expected, from a tray at Cartier’s, but in a back room in Hatton Garden from a man who brought stones out of a safe in little bags and displayed them for her on a writing-desk; then another man in another back room made designs for the setting with a stub of pencil on a sheet of notepaper, and the result excited the admiration of all her friends.

‘How d’you know about these things, Rex?’ she asked.

She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.

His present house in Hertford Street was large enough for them both, and had lately been furnished and decorated by the most expensive firm. Julia said she did not want a house in the country yet; they could always take places furnished when they wanted to go away.

There was trouble about the marriage settlement with which Julia refused to interest herself. The lawyers were in despair. Rex absolutely refused to settle any capital. ‘What do I want with trustee stock?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, darling.’

‘I make money work for me,’ he said. ‘I expect fifteen, twenty per cent and I get it. It’s pure waste tying up capital at three and a half.’

‘I’m sure it is, darling.’

‘These fellows talk as though I were trying to rob you. It’s they who are doing the robbing. They want to rob you of two-thirds of the income I can make you.’

‘Does it matter, Rex? We’ve got heaps, haven’t we?’

Rex hoped to have the whole of Julia’s dowry in his hands, to make it work for him. The lawyers insisted on tying it up, but they could not get, as they asked, a like sum from him. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed to insure his life, after explaining at length to the lawyers that this was merely a device for putting part of his legitimate profits into other people’s pockets; but he had some connexion with an insurance office which made the arrangement slightly less painful to him, by which he took for himself the agent’s commission which the lawyers were themselves expecting.

Last and least came the question of Rex’s religion. He had once attended a royal wedding in Madrid, and he wanted something of the kind for himself.

‘That’s one thing your Church can do,’ he said, ‘put on a good show. You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in England?’

‘Only one, darling.’

‘Only one? Can we hire some others from abroad?’

It was then explained to him that a mixed marriage was a very unostentatious affair.

‘How d’you mean “mixed”? I’m not a nigger or anything.’

‘No, darling, between a Catholic and a Protestant.’

‘Oh, that? Well, if that’s all, it’s soon unmixed. I’ll become a Catholic. What does one have to do?’