She's so nice to your old father.

I say, Nora!"-- he held her again--"you and I have got to prevent her from marrying the wrong man!" Nora shook her head, with an air of middle-aged wisdom.
"Connie will marry whomever she has a mind to!" she said firmly.

"And it's no good, father, you imagining anything else." Ewen Hooper laughed, released her, and sent her to bed.
The days that followed represented the latter part of the interval between the Eights and Commemoration, before Oxford plunged once more into high festival.
It was to be a brilliant Commem.; for an ex-Viceroy of India, a retired Ambassador, England's best General, and five or six foreign men of science and letters, of rather exceptional eminence, were coming to get their honorary degrees.

When Mrs.Hooper, _Times_ in hand, read out at the breakfast-table the names of Oxford's expected guests, Constance Bledlow looked up in surprised amusement.

It seemed the Ambassador and she were old friends; that she had sat on his knee as a baby through various Carnival processions in the Corso, showing him how to throw _confetti_; and that he and Lady F.had given a dance at the Embassy for her coming-out, when Connie, at seventeen, and His Excellency--still the handsomest man in the room, despite years and gout--had danced the first waltz together, and a subsequent minuet; which--though Connie did not say so--had been the talk of Rome.
As to the ex-Viceroy, he was her father's first cousin, and had passed through Rome on his way east, staying three or four days at the Palazzo Barberini.