Lady Agnes had a pause—she had need of all her tact. "Well, if the place is hers and you represent the place—!" she began. But she went no further, for Nick had interrupted her with a laugh.
"What a droll thing to 'represent,' when one thinks of it! And what does it represent, poor stupid little borough with its strong, though I admit clean, smell of meal and its curiously fat-faced inhabitants? Did you ever see such a collection of fat faces turned up at the hustings? They looked like an enormous sofa, with the cheeks for the gathers and the eyes for the buttons."
"Oh well, the next time you shall have a great town," Lady Agnes returned, smiling and feeling that she was tactful.
"It will only be a bigger sofa! I'm joking, of course?" Nick pursued, "and I ought to be ashamed of myself. They've done me the honour to elect me and I shall never say a word that's not civil about them, poor dears. But even a new member may blaspheme to his mother."
"I wish you'd be serious to your mother"—and she went nearer him.
"The difficulty is that I'm two men; it's the strangest thing that ever was," Nick professed with his bright face on her. "I'm two quite distinct human beings, who have scarcely a point in common; not even the memory, on the part of one, of the achievements or the adventures of the other. One man wins the seat but it's the other fellow who sits in it."
"Oh Nick, don't spoil your victory by your perversity!" she cried as she clasped her hands to him.
"I went through it with great glee—I won't deny that: it excited me, interested me, amused me. When once I was in it I liked it. But now that I'm out of it again——!"
"Out of it?" His mother stared. "Isn't the whole point that you're in?"
"Ah now I'm only in the House of Commons."