For the moment political affairs were fairly quiet—next year it would be different—and Harry, ostensibly engaged on a course of historical and sociological reading, spent his time pleasantly between Meriton and his rooms in Jermyn Street. He had access to much society of one kind and another, and was universally popular; his frank delight in pleasing people made him pleasant to them. With women especially he was a great favourite, not for his looks only, though they were a passport to open the door of any drawing-room, but more because they felt that he was a man who appreciated them, valued them, needed them, to whom they were a very big and precious part of life. He had not a shred of that indifference—that independence of them—which is the worst offence in women's eyes. Knowing that they counted for so much to him, it was as fair as it was natural that they should let him count for a good deal with them.
But even universal favourites have their particular ties. For the last few months Harry had been especially attached to Mrs. Freere, the wife of a member of Parliament of his own party who lived in Grosvenor Street. Mr. Freere was an exceedingly laborious person; he sat on more committees than any man in London, and had little leisure for the joys of home life. Mrs. Freere could take very good care of herself, and, all question of principles apart, had no idea of risking the position and the comforts she enjoyed. Subject to the limits thus clearly imposed on her, she had no objection at all to her friendship with Harry Belfield being as sentimental as Harry had been disposed to make it; indeed she had a taste for that kind of thing herself. Once or twice he had tried to overstep the limits, elastic as they were—he was impulsive, Mrs. Freere was handsome—but he had accepted her rebuke with frank penitence, and the friendship had been switched back on to its appointed lines without an accident. The situation was pleasant to her; she was convinced that it was good for Harry. Certainly he met at her house many people whom it was proper and useful for him to meet; and her partiality offered him every opportunity of making favourable impressions. If her conscience needed any other salve—it probably did not feel the need acutely—she could truthfully aver that she was in the constant habit of urging him to lose no time in looking out for a suitable wife.
"A wife is such a help to a man in the House," she would say. "She can keep half the bores away from him. I don't do it because Wilson positively loves bores—being bored gives him a sense of serving his country—but I could if he'd let me."
Harry had been accustomed to meet such prudent counsels with protests of a romantic order; but Mrs. Freere, a shrewd woman, had for some weeks past noticed that the protests were becoming rather less vehement, and decidedly more easy for her to control. When she repeated her advice one day, in the spring after Andy Hayes came back from Canada, Harry looked at her for a moment and said,
"Would you drop me altogether if I did, Lily?" He called her Lily when they were alone.
"I'm married; you haven't dropped me," said Mrs. Freere with a smile.
"Oh, that's different. I shouldn't marry a woman unless I was awfully in love with her."
"I don't think I ought to make that a reason for finally dropping you, because you'll probably be awfully in love with several. Put that difficulty—if it is one—out of your mind. We shall be friends."
"And you wouldn't mind? You—you wouldn't think it—?" He wanted to ask her whether she would think it what, on previous occasions, he had said that he would think it.
Mrs. Freere laughed. "Oh, of course your wife would be rather a bore—just at first, anyhow. But, you know, I can even contemplate my life without you altogether, Harry." She was really fond of him, but she was not a woman given to illusions either about her friends or about herself.