Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and the shadow of a frown passed across her face.  The object of her faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt.  It was Youghal’s ambition—­or perhaps his hobby—­to infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.  His success was only a half-measure.  The public missed in him that touch of blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively sparkle of his epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts.  If he had habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-man, and the gush of the paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his.  The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit further.

It was not Youghal’s lack of political sagacity that had brought the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca’s face.  The fact was that Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a social problem, had lately enrolled himself among the young politician’s associates and admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about politics, and merely copied Youghal’s waistcoats, and, less successfully, his conversation, Francesca felt herself justified in deploring the intimacy.  To a woman who dressed well on comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to have a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely nothing.

The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of the offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that he had gathered about him.

“We were just talking about my new charge,” he observed genially, including in the “we” his somewhat depressed-looking listeners, who in all human probability had done none of the talking.  “I was just telling them, and you may be interested to hear this—­”

Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating smile, though the character of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear and will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.