"Sir Orlando is of course entitled to speak, though I do not know that he is likely to say anything very well worth the hearing. What is his special policy?"
"If he had any, of course, I would hear him. It is not that he wants any special thing to be done, but he thinks that I should get up some special thing in order that Parliament may be satisfied."
"If you wanted to create a majority that might be true. Just listen to him and have done with it."
"I cannot go on in that way. I cannot submit to what amounts to complaint from the gentlemen who are acting with me. Nor would they submit long to my silence. I am beginning to feel that I have been wrong."
"I don't think you have been wrong at all."
"A man is wrong if he attempts to carry a weight too great for his strength."
"A certain nervous sensitiveness, from which you should free yourself as from a disease, is your only source of weakness. Think about your business as a shoemaker thinks of his. Do your best, and then let your customers judge for themselves. Caveat emptor. A man should never endeavour to price himself, but should accept the price which others put on him,—only being careful that he should learn what that price is. Your policy should be to keep your government together by a strong majority. After all, the making of new laws is too often but an unfortunate necessity laid on us by the impatience of the people. A lengthened period of quiet and therefore good government with a minimum of new laws would be the greatest benefit the country could receive. When I recommended you to comply with the Queen's behest I did so because I thought that you might inaugurate such a period more certainly than any other one man." This old Duke was quite content with a state of things such as he described. He had been a Cabinet Minister for more than half his life. He liked being a Cabinet Minister. He thought it well for the country generally that his party should be in power,—and if not his party in its entirety, then as much of his party as might be possible. He did not expect to be written of as a Pitt or a Somers, but he thought that memoirs would speak of him as a useful nobleman,—and he was contented. He was not only not ambitious himself, but the effervescence and general turbulence of ambition in other men was distasteful to him. Loyalty was second nature to him, and the power of submitting to defeat without either shame or sorrow had become perfect with him by long practice. He would have made his brother Duke such as he was himself,—had not his brother Duke been so lamentably thin-skinned.
"I suppose we must try it for another Session?" said the Duke of Omnium with a lachrymose voice.
"Of course we must,—and for others after that, I both hope and trust," said the Duke of St. Bungay, getting up. "If I don't go up-stairs I shall be late, and then her Grace will look at me with unforgiving eyes."
On the following day after lunch the Prime Minister took a walk with Lady Rosina De Courcy. He had fallen into a habit of walking with Lady Rosina almost every day of his life, till the people in the Castle began to believe that Lady Rosina was the mistress of some deep policy of her own. For there were many there who did in truth think that statecraft could never be absent from a minister's mind, day or night. But in truth Lady Rosina chiefly made herself agreeable to the Prime Minister by never making any most distant allusion to public affairs. It might be doubted whether she even knew that the man who paid her so much honour was the Head of the British Government as well as the Duke of Omnium. She was a tall, thin, shrivelled-up old woman,—not very old, fifty perhaps, but looking at least ten years more,—very melancholy, and sometimes very cross. She had been notably religious, but that was gradually wearing off as she advanced in years. The rigid strictness of Sabbatarian practice requires the full energy of middle life. She had been left entirely alone in the world, with a very small income, and not many friends who were in any way interested in her existence. But she knew herself to be Lady Rosina De Courcy, and felt that the possession of that name ought to be more to her than money and friends, or even than brothers and sisters. "The weather is not frightening you," said the Duke. Snow had fallen, and the paths, even where they had been swept, were wet and sloppy.