"Has there been a change?"
"I suppose so. Everything has become so quiet that I cannot imagine that Plantagenet is still in office. Do you know what anybody is doing?"
"The world is going on very smoothly, I take it."
"I hate smoothness. It always means treachery and danger. I feel sure that there will be a great blow up before long. I smell it in the air. Don't you tremble for your husband?"
"Why should I? He likes being in office because it gives him something to do; but he would never be an idle man. As long as he has a seat in Parliament, I shall be contented."
"To have been Prime Minister is something after all, and they can't rob him of that," said the Duchess, recurring again to her own husband. "I half fancy sometimes that the charm of the thing is growing upon him."
"Upon the Duke?"
"Yes. He is always talking of the delight he will have in giving it up. He is always Cincinnatus, going back to his peaches and his ploughs. But I fear he is beginning to feel that the salt would be gone out of his life if he ceased to be the first man in the kingdom. He has never said so, but there is a nervousness about him when I suggest to him the name of this or that man as his successor which alarms me. And I think he is becoming a tyrant with his own men. He spoke the other day of Lord Drummond almost as though he meant to have him whipped. It isn't what one expected from him;—is it?"
"The weight of the load on his mind makes him irritable."
"Either that, or having no load. If he had really much to do he wouldn't surely have time to think so much of that poor wretch who destroyed himself. Such sensitiveness is simply a disease. One can never punish any fault in the world if the sinner can revenge himself upon us by rushing into eternity. Sometimes I see him shiver and shudder, and then I know that he is thinking of Lopez."