Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.

“Of course, you think me very ridiculous,” she said, with a tremulous change of tone.  “I suppose I am.  And I am as inconsistent as anybody—­I hate myself for it.  Very often when anybody talks to me on the other side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists:  they always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker.  But it can’t make any difference to one’s feeling:  nothing touches that.”

She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing—­

“It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging back from her work; when one realises that they have no rights when they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which we, who have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of things is somehow wrong and topsy-turvy and wicked.”  Her voice rose a little, every emphasis grew more passionate.  “And if I don’t do something—­the little such a person as I can—­to alter it before I die, I might as well never have lived.”

Everybody at table started.  Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his mouth twitching over the humour of his sister’s dismay.  Well! this was a forcible young woman:  was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?

Suddenly Lady Winterbourne’s deep voice broke in: 

“I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with you.  I may say that I have agreed with you all my life.”

The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.

“At the same time,” said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally characteristic, “as you say, one is inconsistent.  I was poor once, before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it—­not at all.  And I don’t wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine.  Edward makes the most of these things.  He tells me I have to choose between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave nobody—­not even the richest—­more than four hundred a year.”

“Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road,” said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her.  “I think you might still have a maid.”