The girls were not called upon to dissemble much. Lady Selina talked; they listened politely. Her theme happened to be the treatment of her own order in current fiction and on the stage. She contended that justice had not been done to the upper classes. Dickens had imposed caricatures, such as Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk, upon an immense public, who accepted them as portraits. And ever since men with no more real knowledge of the subject than Dickens had “played to the gallery” in absurd endeavours to present lords as silly and baronets as wicked. “We have our faults,” said Lady Selina, with a bleak smile, “but we are not more foolish or wicked than others. If some of us hide our vices we don’t advertise our virtues. This setting of class against class is criminal. If it ends, as my poor brother predicts, in a débâcle for us within a few years, some other class—Labour, if you like—will establish a new tyranny far more unendurable than the old. And always there will be distinctions. They flourish, so I am told, most vigorously amongst the unprivileged. They grow rankly, as I know, in the servants’ hall.”
“And in a Red Cross hospital,” added Tiddy. “But don’t you think, Lady Selina, that the overlapping of the classes is a good thing?”
“No, I don’t my dear.”
“The House of Lords, for instance, is representative of all classes.”
“And you do away with it! I for one have never objected to the infusion of fresh blood into the Upper House. Let supreme distinction be ennobled. That is a very different thing from putting beggars on horseback.”
As she spoke Stimson was seen approaching, followed by a male visitor.
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Lady Selina. “Stimson was told that we are not at home.”
“It’s Mr. Grimshaw,” said Cicely.
Lady Selina’s brow grew smooth again. She might be “not at home” to a county magnate, but her own people were never turned from her door. Mr. Grimshaw, stepping into what Cicely had called Dr. Pawley’s list slippers, had become, ex officio, one of her people. More, since Cicely’s engagement she had reinstated him honourably as “my boy’s friend.”
“He is bringing us good news of Dr. Pawley.”