The artist smiled again.
"Do you remember," continued Lady Eleanor, "how you once told a whole group of us our faults at a party at the Farleys'? You said that I was ambitious, and that Lady Farley was cruel, and that Isabel was shallow, and that Violet was cold. I have never forgotten it; I thought it was so nice and plucky of you to tell us the truth straight out like that."
Mr. Madderley remembered that he had once said these things; he also remembered that he had never thought any of them, but this he did not consider it necessary to confess.
"But where are the politics you said you were going to talk to me about?"
"Oh! of course—I forgot. I want to ask your opinion as to the way in which the Government has treated me. You know Harry Mortimer was Lord Kesterton's understudy—no, I mean Under Secretary—at the War Office; and it was a very comfortable arrangement for both of them."
"Well?"
"Then Lord Kesterton took his own peerage without a single twinge of conscience. But now that poor, dear Harry has succeeded to his uncle, and become Lord Gravesend, he has got to be sent away like an inefficient footman, because they say they cannot both of them be in the House of Lords. So please tell your host that you think he has behaved abominably!"
"I do indeed. Such conduct seems to me unjustifiable. It is like drinking oneself, and insisting on one's servants being teetotalers."
Lord Kesterton laughed. Madderley always amused him, and he loved to be amused. "But you are keeping back part of the truth, Lady Eleanor," he said; "we have endeavoured to break the blow to Gravesend by giving him the Governorship of New North Wales."
Lady Eleanor sighed. "That is nothing. I wanted Harry to have a career."