Lady Winterbourne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the recipient, since the advent of the new Cabinet, of so much rejoicing over the final exclusion of “that vain old idiot, Alresford,” from any further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina’s talk made her at once nervous and irritable.  She was afraid of being indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down.  In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics.  Her craving idealist nature—­mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy—­was always trying to reconcile the ends of eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party.  It was a task of Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.

“I do not agree with you,” she said with cold shyness in answer to Lady Selina’s concluding laments—­“I am told—­our people say—­we are doing very well—­except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long.”

Lady Selina raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders.

“Dear Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?” she said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded—­“But just think!  The session will go on, every one says, till quite the end of September.  Isn’t that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears.  And my father believes so much of the friction might have been avoided.  He is all in favour of doing more for Labour.  He thinks these Labour men might have been easily propitiated without anything revolutionary.  It’s no good supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!”

“Oh!” said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor.  To those who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more expressive.  Lady Winterbourne’s sense of humour had no voice, but inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the “friend of the poor.” Alresford!—­the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his own servants and estate were concerned.  And as to Lady Selina, it was well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a maid to stay with her six months.

“What did you think of Mr. Wharton’s speech the other night?” said Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.

“It was very interesting,” said Marcella, stiffly—­perfectly conscious that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and angry with her cheeks for reddening.

“Wasn’t it?” said Lady Selina, heartily.  “You can’t do those things, of course!  But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic young men—­the men like that—­shouldn’t you?  That’s what my father says.  He says we’ve got to win them.  We’ve got somehow to make them feel us their friends—­or we shall all go to ruin!  They have the voting power—­and we are the party of education, of refinement.  If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential