“A search?” she murmured, dropping her voice a little, and intimating by the slight movement of her head towards him, that their conversation was to become a tête-á-tête. “Well,” she continued, “I suppose that life is that with all of us, only you see with us poor frivolous people, a search means nearly always the same thing—a search for amusement or distraction, whichever you choose to call it.”
Saton shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“Different things amuse different people,” he remarked. “My search, I will admit, was of a different order.”
“It is finished?” she asked.
“It will never be finished,” he answered. “The man who finds what he seeks,” he added, raising his dark eyes to hers, “as a rule has fixed his ambitions too low.”
“Speaking of ambitions, Mr. Saton,” Lord Penarvon asked across the table, “are you interested in politics?”
“Not in the least,” Saton answered frankly. “There seem to me to be so many other things in life better worth doing than making fugitive laws for a dissatisfied country.”
“Tell me,” his hostess asked, “what do you yourself consider the things better worth doing?”
Saton hesitated. For the first time, he seemed scarcely at his ease. He glanced across at Rochester, and down at his plate.