"Ah, I disagree with you there," said Marie. "Jack, I think, is getting a great hold on the people—the masses, if you like. He dislikes them, and he treats them like dirt; but the masses, as you know, are profound snobs, and rather enjoy that. They like a lord to behave in the way they imagine lords do behave. They even like a wicked lord. On the other hand, they are beginning to see that Jack means business. He thinks the army is wholly inadequate, and, judging from the length of the Boer War, would crumple under a great stress. You see, he considers that the walk-over which was anticipated has degenerated into a stroll. So, instead of joining in the hymn of praise to the British Empire which the Government spend their time in singing, rather out of tune with each other, he stands apart, and says bluntly that we must set to and put ourselves in a far greater state of efficiency, otherwise 'Pop goes the Empire.' Now, that is impalatable, but I think people in general are beginning to see that it may be medicinal."
"I should say it was lucky he's a hereditary legislator," said Jim. "But how about a Government post afterwards?"
"Well, I think the Government may see that, too. They know perfectly well that Jack doesn't care one straw about party questions. He has said as much. What he does care about is the Empire—I think he cares for it more than anything else in the world—and what he knows about is the army. And if this cry for efficiency—which certainly is getting louder—in the country continues, they will have a far better chance of remaining in power if Jack is put at the War Office."
They had come to the far end of the meadow, and Marie paused a moment, looking at the broad, patient stream. Hundreds of pleasure-boats were scattered over its surface, and electric launches and river steamers crowded with roaring Sunday excursionists did their best to make vile one of the most beautiful rivers in the world. Each, indeed, seemed a Bedlam let loose and packed tight. Even the stuffy little cabins were full of feather-hatted girls and amorous young men, who changed hats with each other, without finding the brilliancy of this wit grow the least stale even in endless repetition; took alternate mouthfuls of solid refreshment out of paper bags and of beer out of the same bottle, with shouts of laughter at slightly indelicate suggestions. The poor river was flecked with fragments of bun-bags and floating bottles where trout should have been feeding, and echoes of the music-halls, with absolutely independent wheezings of concertinas, owning no suzerainty, by way of accompaniment, came to Marie and her companion with that curious sharp distinctness with which sound travels over water. For a moment they stood there in silence; then Marie turned quickly in the direction of the lawn behind them, and back to the river again.
"After all—" she said half to herself.
Jim laughed. It was somehow strangely pleasant to him to find himself, as Marie had said, thinking in harness.
"Yes, but less loudly so," he answered, replying to that which she had not said.
"So it seems to us. Those good folk on the river don't seem loud to themselves. But—oh dear me, Jim! what an awkward and inconvenient thing it is to be different from the people one moves among!"
He did not feel that he owed her any mercy on this point. She had refused deliberately the other life he had once offered her.
"Ah, you find that, do you?" he said, his love for her surging up with bitterness in his throat. "Yet you chose it yourself."