There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the tremendous force of accumulated decision—­the inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long immunity, and a certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit of command, had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned.  Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-fledged from an active dominating temperament.  Fortified by the necessity, common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of public affairs; armoured by the tradition of a culture demanded by leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no master, but in servitude to her own custom of leading, she had a mind, formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors the Fitz-Harolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers—­a mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others; produced by those foolish practices of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority.  If Lord Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was the steel spring inside it.  All her life studiously unaffected and simple in attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at something or other from morning till night, and as little worn-out at seventy-eight as most women of fifty, she had only one weak spot—­and that was her strength—­blindness as to the nature and size of her place in the scheme of things.  She was a type, a force.

Wonderfully well she went with the room in which they were dining, whose grey walls, surmounted by a deep frieze painted somewhat in the style of Fragonard, contained many nymphs and roses now rather dim; with the furniture, too, which had a look of having survived into times not its own.  On the tables were no flowers, save five lilies in an old silver chalice; and on the wall over the great sideboard a portrait of the late Lord Casterley.

She spoke: 

“I hope Miltoun is taking his own line?”

“That’s the trouble.  He suffers from swollen principles—­only wish he could keep them out of his speeches.”

“Let him be; and get him away from that woman as soon as his election’s over.  What is her real name?”

“Mrs. something Lees Noel.”

“How long has she been there?”

“About a year, I think.”

“And you don’t know anything about her?”

Lord Valleys raised his shoulders.

“Ah!” said Lady Casterley; “exactly!  You’re letting the thing drift.  I shall go down myself.  I suppose Gertrude can have me?  What has that Mr. Courtier to do with this good lady?”

Lord Valleys smiled.  In this smile was the whole of his polite and easy-going philosophy.  “I am no meddler,” it seemed to say; and at sight of that smile Lady Casterley tightened her lips.