“The nakedness of the honourable gentleman’s mind!”
The game was in his hands. Lord Faramond twisted a shoulder with satisfaction, tossed a whimsical look down the line of the Treasury Bench, and from that Bench came unusual applause.
“Where the devil did he get it?” queried a Minister.
“Out on the buffalo-trail,” replied Lord Faramond. “Good fellow!”
In the Ladies Gallery, Delia clasped her mother’s hand with delight; in the Strangers Gallery, a man said softly, “Not so bad, Cadet.”
Alice Wingfield’s face had a light of aching pleasure. “Gaston, Gaston!” she said, in a whisper heard only by the woman sitting next to her, who though a stranger gave a murmur of sympathy.
Gaston made his last effort in a comparison of the state of the English people now and before she became Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and then incisively traced the social development onwards. It was the work of a man with a dramatic nature and a mathematical turn. He put the time, the manners, the movements, the men, as in a picture.
Presently he grew scornful. His words came hotly, like whip-lashes. He rose to force and power, though his voice was never loud, rather concentrated, resonant. It dropped suddenly to a tone of persuasiveness and conciliation, and declaring that the bill would be merely vicious where it meant to be virtuous, ended with the question:
“Shall we burn the house to roast the pig?”
“That sounds American,” said the member for Burton-Halsey, “but he hasn’t an accent. Pig is vulgar though—vulgar.”