Roger: "Sir Mulberry? I scarcely ever see him. He's much too big a pot to take an interest in me. Besides, he's keenest about the Niger just now. No, I have mostly to do with Bennet Molyneux, who is head of the Department; and I'm afraid I don't care overmuch for him. I like awfully the clerks in the Department except that they don't take Africa very seriously, think it all a joke, a joke bordering rather on boredom. Still, they're some of the jolliest fellows I know. It's Molyneux I can't hit it off with, and they say in the Department it's because I've come in between some poor relation, some cousin of his he wants to push on out there. He got him appointed a Vice-Consul a year or two back and thought he was going to be asked to act for Eccles whilst he was on leave. And now that Lord Wiltshire has said I am to—I don't doubt at your suggestion, sir—Molyneux has turned quite acid. Especially when he had to draft my instructions! I think also he didn't like my setting him right when I first came to work in the office. He wrote some minutes about the Slave Trade and about the Germans which were the uttermost rubbish you ever read, and he never forgave me for not backing him up at a departmental committee they held—Sir Mulberry presided. And the mere fact that Thrumball and Landsdell have been awfully kind to me and had me to dine with them seems to have soured him. And when one day Lord Wiltshire sent for me to answer some questions—Well, I thought afterwards Molyneux would have burst with spleen. He threw official reserve to the winds and walked up and down in his big room raving—'I've been in this office since 1869,' he said, 'and I don't believe Lord Wiltshire knows me by sight. Yet he's ready to send for the veriest outsider if he thinks he can get any information out of him. The Office is going to the dogs—and so on....'"
Lord Silchester: "Molyneux, Bennet Molyneux. I know him. Not a bad fellow in some respects, but a bad enemy to make. He is a kind of cousin of Feenix's—Colonial Office, you know. Well, your fate is in your own hands ... you must walk warily..." (at this a servant enters and informs his lordship that the carriage is waiting) "I must be off. Sibyl! you won't stay up late? Roger, don't talk to her for more than an hour. Good-bye. Of course, you'll come and see us before you actually sail?..." (goes out).
A pause.
Sibyl: "You may smoke now; but only a cigarette, not a cigar." (Roger lights a cigarette.)
Sibyl: "What dear old Francis said was very good advice. Mind you follow it. Get on the right side of these old permanencies. Whenever Francis begins his instances and illustrations I feel what a perfect book of reminiscences he will some day write. But, of course, it wouldn't do till he's reached an age when he can no longer serve in the Government.... I want him some day to be at the Foreign Office or at least the India Office. I do so love the pomp of those positions, the great parties in the season, the entertaining of delightful creatures from the East with jewelled turbans...."
Roger (a little abruptly): "Are you happy....?"
Sibyl (turning her head and looking at him intently): "Happy? Why, of course. Perfectly happy. Everything has gone splendidly. And now that I'm going to have a child.... I do hope it'll be a boy. Francis would be so happy. You quite realize if he has no heir the peerage and all the entailed estates go away to some perfectly horrid second cousin out in Australia...."
Roger: "In view of that possibility I wonder he did not marry years ago, when he was a young man...."
Sibyl: "My dear! How could he? He was a younger son and in the diplomatic service with barely enough to live on, respectably. And then he got tangled up with another man's wife. He thinks I know nothing about that side of him, but as a matter of fact I know everything. His elder brother, the fifth Lord Silchester, was an awfully bad lot—treated his wife very badly—they were separated and their only son was brought up by his mother to be dreadfully goody-goody. Francis's elder brother died in Paris—I daresay you have heard or read where and how. It was one of the closing scandals of the Second Empire. But then the goody-goody son married after he succeeded—married a sister of Lord Towcester. She was killed in the hunting field and her rather limp husband died of grief afterwards, or of consumption, and Francis came into the title rather unexpectedly five years ago. Then he was embarrassed by his Darby and Joan attachment to Mrs. Bolsover.—However, then she died—and so—at last he felt free to marry....
"I met him first at a croquet party at Aldermaston Park. I saw at once he was struck with me.... However, we won't go over the old argument again which we talked out that day at Silchester.... D'you remember? My ankles were so bitten by harvest-bugs after sitting on those mounds, I shan't forget!..." (meditates).... "I'm much happier than if I had married you.... My dear, that would never have done.... But that need not prevent our being the best of friends, the most attached of cousins.... It's a bore having a confinement in the Jubilee year.... I'd meant to rival Suzanne Feenix in my entertainments.... But if I give Silchester a boy, he will refuse me nothing.... And I mean, as soon as I'm up and about again, to push him on. He's rich—those Staffordshire mines and potteries. He's got lots of ability, but he's too fond of leisure and isn't quite ambitious enough. Complains of being tired.... He's only 57 ... but he much prefers spending the evening at home and reading history and memoirs. Still, if Lord Wiltshire gets overworked at the Foreign Office, Francis simply must succeed him. He knows everything about foreign policy from A to Z, after serving so many years in Vienna and Rome.... Well, dear old boy, this is really good-bye. Make good out there, and don't make a fool of yourself with some grass widow going out, or some fair missionaryess.... I suppose some of them are fit to look at? ... Play up to the permanencies, and try to write some dispatch that'll interest Lord Wiltshire. Then Silchester may get a chance of putting his oar in and have you shifted to a better post and a more healthy one. After that I'll take a hand and marry you to some nice girl with a little money.... I wonder whether you'll feel lonely out there? But men never are, so long as they can move about and get some shooting ... which reminds me I want a lot more leopard skins. Don't mount them: I like to choose my own colours——"