‘Oh, yes, there are some of them with brains, I suppose,’ Hilda answered, as one who makes a great concession. ‘There’s Herbert Alderney, who’s member for somewhere or other—Church Stretton, I think—and makes speeches in the House; he’s clever, they say, but such a conceited fellow to talk to. And there’s Wilfrid Faunthorp, who writes poems, and gets them printed in the magazines, too, because he knows the editors. And there’s Randolph Hastings, who goes in for painting, and has little red and blue daubs at the Grosvenor by special invitation of the director. But somehow they none of them strike me as being really original. Whenever I meet anybody worth talking to anywhere—in a railway train or so on—I feel sure at once he’s an ordinary commoner, not even Honourable; and he is invariably, you may depend upon it.’
‘That would naturally happen on the average of instances,’ Ernest put in, smiling, ‘considering the relative frequency of peers and commoners in this realm of England. Peers, you know, or even Honourables are not common objects of the country, numerically speaking.’
‘They are to me, unfortunately,’ Hilda replied, looking at him inquiringly. ‘I hardly ever meet anybody else, you know, and I’m positively bored to death by them, and that’s the truth, really. It’s most unlucky, under the circumstances, that I should happen to be the daughter of one peer, and be offered promiscuously as wife to the highest bidder among half a dozen others, if only I would have them. But I won’t, Mr. Le Breton, I really won’t. I’m not going to marry a fool, just to please my mother. Nothing on earth would induce me to marry Lord Connemara, for example.’
Ernest looked at her and smiled, but said nothing.
Lady Hilda put in a stroke or two more to her pencil outline, and then continued her unsolicited confidences. ‘Do you know, Mr. Le Breton,’ she went on, ‘there’s a conspiracy—the usual conspiracy, but still a regular conspiracy I call it—between Papa and Mamma to make me marry that stick of a Connemara. What is there in him, I should like to know, to make any girl admire or love him? And yet half the girls in London would be glad to get him, for all his absurdity. It’s monstrous, it’s incomprehensible, it’s abominable; but it’s the fact. For my part, I must say I do like a little originality. And whenever I hear Papa, and Uncle Sussex, and Lord Connemara talking at dinner, it does seem to me too ridiculously absurd that they should each have a separate voice in Parliament, and that you shouldn’t even have a fraction of a vote for a county member. What sort of superiority has Lord Connemara over you, I wonder?’ And she looked at Ernest again with a searching glance, to see whether he was to be moved by such a personal and emphatic way of putting the matter.
Ernest looked back at her curiously in his serious simplicity, and only answered, ‘There are a great many queer inequalities and absurdities in all our existing political systems, Lady Hilda.’
Hilda smiled to herself—a quiet smile, half of disappointment, half of complacent feminine superiority. What a stupid fellow he was in some ways, after all! Even that silly Lord Connemara would have guessed what she was driving at, with only a quarter as much encouragement. But Ernest must be too much afraid of the social barrier clearly; so she began again, this time upon a slightly different but equally obvious tack.
‘Yes, there are; absurd inequalities really, Mr. Le Breton; very absurd inequalities. You’d get rid of them all, I know. You told me that about cutting all the landlords’ heads off, I’m sure, though you said when I spoke about it before Mamma, the night you first came here, that you didn’t mean it. I remember it perfectly well, because I recollect thinking at the time the idea was so charmingly and deliciously original.’
‘You must be quite mistaken, Lady Hilda,’ Ernest answered calmly. ‘You misunderstood my meaning. I said I would get rid of landlords—by which I meant to say, get rid of them as landlords, not as individuals. I don’t even know that I’d take away the land from them all at once, you know (though I don’t think it’s justly theirs); I’d deprive them of it tentatively and gradually.’
‘Well, I can’t see the justice of that, I’m sure,’ Hilda answered carelessly. ‘Either the land’s ours by right, or it isn’t ours. If it’s ours, you ought to leave it to us for ever; and if it isn’t ours, you ought to take it away from us at once, and make it over to the people to whom it properly belongs. Why on earth should you keep them a day longer out of their own?’