"Then everything is over for me. I shall settle down in the country and build cottages, and mix draughts. You, Marie, will still be going up the tree. If Mr. Finn manages well he may come to be Prime Minister some day."
"He has hardly such ambition, Lady Glen."
"The ambition will come fast enough;—will it not, Plantagenet? Let him once begin to dream of it as possible, and the desire will soon be strong enough. How should you feel if it were so?"
"It is quite impossible," said Mrs. Finn, gravely.
"I don't see why anything is impossible. Sir Orlando will be Prime Minister now, and Sir Timothy Beeswax Lord Chancellor. After that anybody may hope to be anything. Well,—I suppose we may go to bed. Is your carriage here, my dear?"
"I hope so."
"Ring the bell, Plantagenet, for somebody to see her down. Come to lunch to-morrow because I shall have so many groans to utter. What beasts, what brutes, what ungrateful wretches men are!—worse than women when they get together in numbers enough to be bold. Why have they deserted you? What have we not done for them? Think of all the new bedroom furniture that we sent to Gatherum merely to keep the party together. There were thousands of yards of linen, and it has all been of no use. Don't you feel like Wolsey, Plantagenet?"
"Not in the least, my dear. No one will take anything away from me that is my own."
"For me, I am almost as much divorced as Catherine, and have had my head cut off as completely as Anne Bullen and the rest of them. Go away, Marie, because I am going to have a cry by myself."
The Duke himself on that night put Mrs. Finn into her carriage; and as he walked with her downstairs he asked her whether she believed the Duchess to be in earnest in her sorrow. "She so mixes up her mirth and woe together," said the Duke, "that I myself sometimes can hardly understand her."