As Lord Windlehurst uttered the last word with an arid smile, he looked quizzically at the central figure of a group of people gaily talking.
The Duchess impatiently tapped her knee with a fan. “Be thankful you haven’t got him on your conscience,” she rejoined. “I call Eglington unscrupulous and unreliable. He has but one god—getting on; and he has got on, with a vengeance. Whenever I look at that dear thing he’s married, I feel there’s no trusting Providence, who seems to make the deserving a footstool for the undeserving. I’ve known Hylda since she was ten, and I’ve known him since the minute he came into the world, and I’ve got the measure of both. She is the finest essence the middle class can distil, and he, oh, he’s paraffin-vin ordinaire, if you like it better, a selfish, calculating adventurer!”
Lord Windlehurst chuckled mordantly. “Adventurer! That’s what they called me—with more reason. I spotted him as soon as he spoke in the House. There was devilry in him, and unscrupulousness, as you say; but, I confess, I thought it would give way to the more profitable habit of integrity, and that some cause would seize him, make him sincere and mistaken, and give him a few falls. But in that he was more original than I thought. He is superior to convictions. You don’t think he married yonder Queen of Hearts from conviction, do you?”
He nodded towards a corner where Hylda, under a great palm, and backed by a bank of flowers, stood surrounded by a group of people palpably amused and interested; for she had a reputation for wit—a wit that never hurt, and irony that was only whimsical.
“No, there you are wrong,” the Duchess answered. “He married from conviction, if ever a man did. Look at her beauty, look at her fortune, listen to her tongue. Don’t you think conviction was easy?”
Lord Windlehurst looked at Hylda approvingly. She has the real gift—little information, but much knowledge, the primary gift of public life. “Information is full of traps; knowledge avoids them, it reads men; and politics is men—and foreign affairs, perhaps! She is remarkable. I’ve made some hay in the political world, not so much as the babblers think, but I hadn’t her ability at twenty-five.”
“Why didn’t she see through Eglington?”
“My dear Betty, he didn’t give her time. He carried her off her feet. You know how he can talk.”
“That’s the trouble. She was clever, and liked a clever man, and he—!”
“Quite so. He’d disprove his own honest parentage, if it would help him on—as you say.”