Her voice dropped drearily.  Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl’s nascent adoration.  Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy, but absorbed like Betty in Marcella.  Lady Selina, studying the three with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful attention to fringe and hairpins.  As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the beginning of Marcella’s talk, to greet a visitor.  She and he were standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory, unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.

“Don’t you think,” said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, “that it would be a very good thing to send all the Radicals—­the well-to-do Radicals I mean—­to live among the poor?  It seems to teach people such extremely useful things!”

Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her impertinently.  She looked round quickly.

“I wonder what you suppose it teaches?”

“Well,” said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; “well!  I suppose it teaches a person to be content—­and not to cry for the moon!”

“You think,” said Marcella, slowly, “that to live among the poor can teach any one—­any one that’s human—­to be content!”

Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours.  Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation—­without pose.  At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.

Lady Selina’s feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior.  She drew herself up.

“As I understand you,” she said stiffly, “you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth.”

Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude’s made the speaker turn her head.  She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.

“Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion?  Most consoling, wasn’t it—­on the whole—­to us West End people?”

She threw back a keen glance at Marcella.  Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn came forward.

“I made him be quiet,” said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at her ease; “it would have been a shame to interrupt.”

“I think so, indeed!” said Lady Selina, with emphasis.  “Good-bye, dear Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce!  You have comforted me very much!  Of course one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to hear from anybody who knows as much about it as you do, that—­after all—­it is no crime—­to possess a little!”

She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man—­then, escorted by Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.