“Which are the British Empire?” asked Adrienne. “You. To begin with.”
“Oh, no. Count me out. I’m only a snappy, snuffy scribbler. Good old Lord Lumley, of course, with all his vast, well-governed provinces shimmering in the Indian sun behind him. And Sir Archibald, who talks so loudly in the House. Palgrave didn’t bring him, I’ll be bound.”
“No. Lady Lumley brought him. He and Lord Lumley are certainly more than odds and ends.” She had an air of making no attempt to meet his badinage, if it was that, but of mildly walking past it. “They are, both of them, rather splendid people, in spite of their limitations. They’ve accepted tradition, you see, instead of growing opinion. That is their only trouble. I was afraid you were going to say Mr. Haviland. He is certainly an odd and end.”
Mr. Haviland and Mrs. Pope had found each other and were indulging in mirthful repartee in the back drawing-room. “I feel safe with Lord Lumley and Sir Archibald,” Adrienne added.
“I’d certainly rather trust myself in their hands than in Mr. Besley’s. I’d almost rather trust myself in the hands of Mr. Haviland.”
“You mean that they would, at least, keep you comfortable and that Mr. Besley wouldn’t.” She, too, had her forms of repartee.
“I expect it’s just what I do mean,” he assented. “If Mr. Besley and his friends had their way, I for instance, and workers of my type, would soon, I suspect, have to forego our tobacco and our chamber-music. We’re only marketable in a comfortable world. And there are more comfortable people, I maintain, under Lord Lumley, than there would be under Mr. Besley.”
“‘Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive,’” said Adrienne. “All revolutions must begin by burning away the evil and the refuse. Not that I am a revolutionist, or even a socialist.”
“You can’t separate good from evil by burning,” he said. “You burn them both. That’s what the French did in their lamentable bonfire, for which they’ve been paying in poorer brains and poorer blood ever since. We don’t want revolutions. All we want is slow, good-tempered reform. Revolutions are always ill-tempered, aren’t they, and nothing worth doing was ever done in an ill-temper. You are making me very didactic.”
“Oh, but I prefer that so much to persiflage,” said Adrienne, with her tranquillity. “And I am glad to hear what you really believe. But it is sad to me that you should see no ardour or glory in anything. With all its excesses and errors, I have always felt the French Revolution to be a sublime expression of the human spirit.”