"You might have all the excitement still, if you pleased. You need not be dead to politics because your husband is not Prime Minister."
"No; never again,—unless he should come back. If any one had told me ten years ago that I should have taken an interest in this or that man being in the Government, I should have laughed him to scorn. It did not seem possible to me then that I should care what became of such men as Sir Timothy Beeswax and Mr. Roby. But I did get to be anxious about it when Plantagenet was shifted from one office to another."
"Of course you did. Do you think I am not anxious about Phineas?"
"But when he became Prime Minister, I gave myself up to it altogether. I shall never forget what I felt when he came to me and told me that perhaps it might be so;—but told me also that he would escape from it if it were possible. I was the Lady Macbeth of the occasion all over;—whereas he was so scrupulous, so burdened with conscience! As for me, I would have taken it by any means. Then it was that the old Duke played the part of the three witches to a nicety. Well, there hasn't been any absolute murder, and I haven't quite gone mad."
"Nor need you be afraid, though all the woods of Gatherum should come to Matching."
"God forbid! I will never see anything of Gatherum again. What annoys me most is, and always was, that he wouldn't understand what I felt about it;—how proud I was that he should be Prime Minister, how anxious that he should be great and noble in his office;—how I worked for him, and not at all for any pleasure of my own."
"I think he did feel it."
"No;—not as I did. At last he liked the power,—or rather feared the disgrace of losing it. But he had no idea of the personal grandeur of the place. He never understood that to be Prime Minister in England is as much as to be an Emperor in France, and much more than being President in America. Oh, how I did labour for him,—and how he did scold me for it with those quiet little stinging words of his! I was vulgar!"
"Is that a quiet word?"
"Yes;—as he used it;—and indiscreet, and ignorant, and stupid. I bore it all, though sometimes I was dying with vexation. Now it's all over, and here we are as humdrum as any one else. And the Beeswaxes, and the Robys, and the Droughts, and the Pountneys, and the Lopezes, have all passed over the scene! Do you remember that Pountney affair, and how he turned the poor man out of the house?"