Mary interrupted him, absently, demurely, with a little speech that appeared to be a quotation.

“Labour is a pretty beast in its cage to the philanthropic visitor with buns; its temper is better understood of the professional keeper.”

Lady Garnett arched her eyebrows pensively; Charles looked surprised, displeased; Mary hastened to explain, blushing a little: 

“I beg your pardon! the phrase is Mr. Rainham’s.  I believe it is the only political principle he has.”

Charles’s displeasure at the maxim cooled to lofty disdain of its author.

“Ah, yes!—­pretty, but cynical, as I should say most of Mr. Rainham’s principles were.”

Lady Garnett was aroused out of her state of vacant boredom for the first time into a certain interest.  Mary sat, her hands clasped in her lap, the flush just dying away out of her pale cheeks, while Mr. Sylvester embarked upon an elaborate disquisition of his principles and his programme—­it might have been an expansion of his Parliamentary address—­which the elder lady, whom a chance phrase had started upon a new line of thought, scarcely considered.

Does he know? she asked herself.  Has this rather stupid young man grown suddenly acute enough to be jealous?  Certainly there had been a flash, a trace of curious rancour in his brief mention of Rainham’s name, for which it was scarcely easy to account.  That the two men, in spite of their long juxtaposition, had never been more than acquaintances, had never been in the least degree friends, she was perfectly well aware; it was not in the nature of either of them to be more intimately allied.

Rainham’s indolent humour and fantastic melancholy, his genial disregard of popularity or success, could not but be displeasing to a man so precise and practical as the barrister.  Only now she had scented, had dimly perceived beneath his speech, something more than the indefinable aversion of incompatible tempers, a very personal and present dislike.  Had things passed between them, things of which she was ignorant?  Was the sentiment, then, reciprocal?  She hardly believed it:  Rainham’s placid temper gave to his largest hostilities the character merely of languid contempt; it was not worth the trouble to hate anyone, he had said to her so often—­neither to hate nor to love.  She could imagine him with infidelities on occasion to the last part of his rule; yes, she could imagine that—­but for hatred, no! he had said rightly he was too indolent for that.  It must be all on one side, then, as happens so frequently in life with love and hate, and the rest—­all on one side.  And the barrister had risen to take his leave before her reflections had brought her further than this.

CHAPTER XX