“Eglington hasn’t far to go, if that’s the truth.”
“Well, well, when it comes, we must help him—we must help him up again.”
The Duchess nervously adjusted her wig, with ludicrously tiny fingers for one so ample, and said petulantly: “You are incomprehensible. He has been a traitor to you and to your party, he has thrown mud at you, he has played with principles as my terrier plays with his rubber ball, and yet you’ll run and pick him up when he falls, and—”
“‘And kiss the spot to make it well,’” he laughed softly, then added with a sigh: “Able men in public life are few; ‘far too few, for half our tasks; we can spare not one.’ Besides, my dear Betty, there is his pretty lass o’ London.”
The Duchess was mollified at once. “I wish she had been my girl,” she said, in a voice a little tremulous. “She never needed looking after. Look at the position she has made for herself. Her father wouldn’t go into society, her mother knew a mere handful of people, and—”
“She knew you, Betty.”
“Well, suppose I did help her a little—I was only a kind of reference. She did the rest. She’s set a half-dozen fashions herself—pure genius. She was born to lead. Her turnouts were always a little smarter, her horses travelled a little faster, than other people’s. She took risks, too, but she didn’t play a game; she only wanted to do things well. We all gasped when she brought Adelaide to recite from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at an evening party, but all London did the same the week after.”
“She discovered, and the Duchess of Snowdon applied the science. Ah, Betty, don’t think I don’t agree. She has the gift. She has temperament. No woman should have temperament. She hasn’t scope enough to wear it out in some passion for a cause. Men are saved in spite of themselves by the law of work. Forty comes to a man of temperament, and then a passion for a cause seizes him, and he is safe. A woman of temperament at forty is apt to cut across the bows of iron-clad convention and go down. She has temperament, has my lady yonder, and I don’t like the look of her eyes sometimes. There’s dark fire smouldering in them. She should have a cause; but a cause to a woman now-a-days means ‘too little of pleasure, too much of pain,’ for others.”
“What was your real cause, Windlehurst? You had one, I suppose, for you’ve never had a fall.”
“My cause? You ask that? Behold the barren figtree! A lifetime in my country’s service, and you who have driven me home from the House in your own brougham, and told me that you understood—oh, Betty!”