“Hamilton is away on business, looking after the place we’re going to buy in Kent. I shall see him later. But just now I’m having a holiday,” said Miss Rivers. “I wanted to flirt with you. You’re safe and amusing—amusing, that is, when you keep off the menu. Where are you going to after here to-night?”
“Oh, to a horrible political thing, where we shall all be good, and talk humbug, and be bored to death. If I hadn’t chanced to be in the Cabinet, I should probably have gone to see a prize-fight.” His eye traveled down the table to where Theodore Shelf was looking saintly, with his head on one side, and washing his large white hands with invisible soap. “I’d chance it, my dear, and go, if I thought I could manage to meet——”
Amy Rivers had followed his glance. She turned to him with a demure smile.
“Well,” she said, “who?”
“Oh, just one or two of my colleagues on the same side of the House. Hang it all, Amy, the fellows can’t always be what they set up for in front of their clients.”
Miss Rivers laughed.
“You’re a bold, bad lot,” she said. “I know I shall see you in the police-court one of these days for breaking lamp-posts, or running away with a hansom cab. There’s a vein of wickedness in you that’s completely thrown away in a Cabinet Minister.”
His lordship grinned, and turned to Mrs. Shelf. He admired Mrs. Shelf because she was an extremely handsome woman. He rather dreaded her just now, because he knew she wanted something out of him. And he had to talk to her because it was policy to do so.
The complete Art of Spreading Butter is not one to be mastered by everybody. In the lower grades it is easy: any one can tickle a fool. But when the subject has wallowed in all the cleverest kinds of flattery for many years of his life, then it is a different matter. If you set about your work in a clumsy way, he begins at once to mildly hate you. If you only half do it, the man is resentful because he has not received his due.
Mrs. Shelf avoided the pitfalls. The great Minister stayed suspicious—she could not alter that—but she put him in a most excellent humor with himself; and the dinner was surpassing good. He took kümmel and cognac for his liqueur, and she watched an ecstasy flicker to his face as he drained the little glass. The hum of the talk rose high in the room, and her voice met his ear alone. He heard her asking that Theodore Shelf might be elevated to the House of Lords.