“I don’t know what is to be done for the people this winter,” said Lord Maxwell, “without pauperising them, I mean.  To give money is easy enough.  Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and thought no more of it.  We don’t get through so easily.”

“No,” said Lady Winterbourne, sighing.  “It weighs one down.  Last winter was a nightmare.  The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!—­though we seemed to be always giving.  And in the middle of it Edward would buy me a new set of sables.  I begged him not, but he laughed at me.”

“Well, my dear,” said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, “if nobody bought sables, there’d be other poor people up in Russia, isn’t it?—­or Hudson’s Bay?—­badly off.  One has, to think of that.  Oh, you needn’t talk, Aldous!  I know you say it’s a fallacy. I call it common sense.”

She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left his great-aunt to work out her own economics.  And, anyway, she saw that he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in watching Miss Boyce.

“It’s precisely as Lord Maxwell says,” replied Lady Winterbourne; “that kind of thing used to satisfy everybody.  And our grandmothers were very good women.  I don’t know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went free.”

She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes.  Miss Raeburn, looking round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.

“Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I’m sure.  I have heard tales of Miss Boyce’s opinions!” said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with an old man’s indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.

Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her head was drooped a little.  At his challenge she looked up with a start.  She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a girl’s fancies.  But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.

“What tales have you heard?” she asked him.

“You alarm us, you know,” he said gallantly, waiving her question.  “We can’t afford a prophetess to the other side, just now.”

Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.

“Oh!  I am not a Radical!” said Marcella, half scornfully.  “We Socialists don’t fight for either political party as such.  We take what we can get out of both.”

“So you call yourself a Socialist?  A real full-blown one?”

Lord Maxwell’s pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at luncheon.

“Yes, I am a Socialist,” she said slowly, looking at him.  “At least I ought to be—­I am in my conscience.”

“But not in your judgment?” he said laughing.  “Isn’t that the condition of most of us?”