"What?" Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. "Losing two of the four people I cared most for on earth?"
"Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over. You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging from obscurity for the first time."
The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy. He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled surface of his brain.
Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: "Oh, God! Oh, God!" although his lips were silent.
But she did not change the subject.
"I suppose you haven't seen the newspapers," she said. "I cut out all the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career was a greater political tragedy than Parnell's or Lord Randolph Churchill's."
"Do they say that?" asked Gwynne, eagerly. "Well, God knows, it is a tragedy for me."
"Don't you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine, possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a title, especially in such a pretty one as yours; and there is no doubt that you are a more imposing figure in the eyes of the world to-day than you were a week ago. Are you really indifferent to that side of it?"
"Am I? One does such a lot of self-posing and self-imposition. There are few things in this world that gratify a man's vanity more than being a peer of Great Britain, and, no doubt, had I happened to be born without what you might call a fighting ambition, and certain abilities, I should—barring natural grief—feel that I was one of the favorites of destiny—that is to say if I had a commensurate income. The fact that I must let the Abbey and Capheaton, and after portioning off all the unmarried women of the family, shall have barely enough left to keep up my flat in Charles Street, may have something to do with my absence of enthusiasm. But—yes—I am sure of myself!" he burst out. "I am the most miserable man on earth to-night, and the reason is not that I have lost two good friends, but because my career is ruined, broken off in the middle."
"You could become a militant Liberal peer."