An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-room of Alresford House, receiving her guests.  She was out of sorts and temper, and though Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her during dinner—­when he was of necessity parted from her by people of higher rank—­of a tete-a-tete with him before the evening was over, the dinner went heavily.  The Duke on her right hand, and the Dean on her left, were equally distasteful to her.  Neither food nor wine had savour; and once, when in an interval of talk she caught sight of her father’s face and form at the further end, growing more vacant and decrepit week by week, she was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and repulsion.  Her father wearied and disgusted her.  Life was often triste and dull in the great house.  Yet, when the old man should have found his grave, she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days would be so much the more tedious.

Wharton, too, showed less than his usual animation.  She said to herself at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep.  His young brilliant look was somewhat tarnished, and there was worry in the restless eye.  And, indeed, she knew that things had not been going so favourably for him in the House of late—­that the stubborn opposition of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before.  She supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking Midland strike.  The Clarion had been throwing itself into the battle of the men with a monstrous violence, for which she had several times reproached him.

When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Alresford, duly placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter.

“Oh, the usual thing!” he said, as he leant against the mantelpiece beside her.  “The world’s a poor place, and my doll’s stuffed with sawdust.  Did you ever know any doll that wasn’t?”

She looked up at him a moment without speaking.

“Which means,” she said, “that you can’t get your way in the House?”

“No,” said Wharton, meditatively, looking down at his boots.  “No—­not yet.”

“You think you will get it some day?”

He raised his eyes.

“Oh yes!” he said; “oh dear, yes!—­some day.”

She laughed.

“You had better come over to us.”

“Well, there is always that to think of, isn’t there?  You can’t deny you want all the new blood you can get!”

“If you only understood your moment and your chance,” she said quickly, “you would make the opportunity and do it at once.”

He looked at her aggressively.

“How easy it comes to you Tories to rat!” he said.

“Thank you! it only means that we are the party of common sense.  Well, I have been talking to your Miss Boyce.”