The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was the widow of a peer's son who had been a cabinet minister and had signalised his political career by supporting every bill for the emancipation of women, and his domestic one by impressing upon his wife that her true sphere was the home. The natural reaction followed after his death, when Mrs. Keeley broke loose from the restraint his presence had put upon her, and practised the precepts he had loved to expound in public. She became the most active of political women; she spoke upon platforms; she harried the rate-payers until they elected her favourite county councillor; she canvassed in the slums for the candidate who would vote for woman's suffrage. She had a passion for everything that was modern, irrespective of its value; and she spent the time that was not occupied by her public duties in trying to force her principles upon her only daughter. But Marion Keeley refused to be modern, except in her amusements; she accepted the bicycle and the cigarette with equanimity, but she had no desires to reform anything or anybody; she merely wanted to enjoy herself as much as possible, and she looked forward to making a wealthy marriage in the future. Her greatest ambition was to avoid being bored, and her greatest trial was the energy of her mother. She never pretended to be advanced; and she felt that she had been wasted on the wrong mother when she saw most of the girls of her acquaintance burning to do things in defiance of their old-fashioned parents. She chose her own friends from the idle world of Mayfair; and so it was that two distinct sets of people met in the Keeleys' drawing-room on Thursday afternoons and disapproved of each other.
Katharine received a warm reception from her hostess. The fact that she belonged to the class of working gentlewomen, about whom Mrs. Keeley had many theories but little knowledge, was a sufficient evidence of her right to be encouraged; and she found herself seated on an uncomfortable stool, and introduced to an East-end clergyman and a lady inspector of factories within five minutes of her entry into the room. She glanced rather longingly towards the back drawing-room, where her cousin Marion was looking very pretty and was flirting very charmingly with three smart-looking boys; but it was evident that her aunt had labelled her as one of her own set, and she resigned herself to her fate, and agreed with the East-end clergyman that the want of rain was becoming serious.
"My niece lectures, you know; strikingly clever, and so young," said Mrs. Keeley in a breathless aside to the lady inspector, as she came back from the opposite side of the room, where she had just coupled a socialist and a guardian of the poor.
"Indeed!" said the lady inspector; and Katharine began to lose her diffidence when she found that she smiled quite like an ordinary person. "Do you lecture on hygiene? Because Mr. Hodgson-Pemberton is getting up some popular lectures in his parish, and we are trying to find a lecturer for hygiene?"
Mr. Hodgson-Pemberton became animated for a moment; but when Katharine said, apologetically, that her subjects were merely literary, he took no further interest in her and resumed his conversation with the lady inspector of factories. Katharine was left alone again, and relapsed into one of her dreams, until Marion recognised her and came and fetched her into the back drawing-room.
"Isn't it refreshing?" she said to the boys, who had now increased in number: "Kitty doesn't know anything about politics, and she doesn't want to be with the fogies at all, do you, Kitty? And, for all that, she is dreadfully clever, and gives lectures on all sorts of things to all sorts of people. Oh, dear, I do wish I were clever!"
"Oh, please don't be clever, Miss Keeley! you won't know me any longer if you are," said her favourite boy, imploringly.
"You are far too charming to be clever," added another boy, who had been her favourite last week, and was trying to regain his position by elaborate compliments.
"That's rubbish," said Marion crushingly; "and not very polite to my cousin, either."
The dethroned favourite did his best to repair his blunder by assuring Katharine that he would never have supposed her to be clever, if he had not been told so. And when she laughed uncontrollably at his remark, he chose to be offended, and withdrew altogether.