"Parables, my lady?"
"Yes. Do you know that we won the election because rosy Sir Winterton was supposed to have flirted with his keeper's daughter, and wouldn't say he hadn't, and wouldn't bring that dear soul where anybody was likely to say he had?"
"No, I hadn't heard that. I thought your husband's——"
"Oh, yes, all that helped. He was splendid. But we shouldn't have done it without the keeper's daughter."
"Vox populi, vox Dei; they're both so hard to understand."
"I've been longing for you," she said, seeming to awake suddenly from her half-dreamy half-playful account of the life she had been living. The speech, with its cruel frankness and its more cruel affection, embittered him.
"When you're tired of a rosy apple, you like a bite at a bitter cherry? One bite; the rest of me, I suppose, is only to dress the table."
She understood him.
"Well, then, you shouldn't come," she protested. "I've been fair about it."
"No, not always; what you write and say now and then isn't fair unless it means something more."