This cheerless fact had to be taken for granted. Divorce in its various aspects was a constant preoccupation of the right honorable gentleman. He had never been married himself, and was never likely to be. Had this not been the case Mr. Gregory Nixon must have felt bound to defer to any opinion that Mr. Angrove might or might not have expressed upon the matter.
"We are in for it now," whispered Mary to the Sailor, who was eating the entrée, sweetbreads with white sauce, and wishing he could use a knife as well as a fork. "But it's Uncle George's fault. He's given him a chance with his silly and pointless story, which is a mere perversion of a very much better one. There, what did I say?"
It was tragically true, that Mr. Nixon was already in the saddle.
"If he would only say something sensible! He is like that character in Dickens—but his King Charles's head is the minority report."
Still, this may have been a woman's thrust, because Mary did not happen to be an admirer of Mr. Nixon's personality. Yet he was a very agreeable man, and on the subject of divorce he talked extraordinarily well, perhaps quite as well as it is possible for any human being to talk on such a vexed and complicated subject.
Mr. Nixon knew that, no doubt. The fact was, that just as one man may have a genius for playing chess, another for shooting clay pigeons, a third for hitting a golf ball or casting a fly, so this eminent politician had a genius for discussing divorce. He may have felt that on that topic no human being could stand against him at a small dinner party where the conversation was general. Lady Pridmore seemed grieved when her hero began to expose this flaw in the armor of a Christian gentleman, Uncle George became furious and was suddenly rude to the butler, Mary and Silvia and the Prince looked the picture of misery, and Edward Ambrose came within an ace of choking himself.
All the same, the discussion which followed was of breathless interest to one person at that table. Henry Harper hung on every word of it.
Mary herself was the first to take up the gage of battle. And she took it up gallantly. She didn't think for a moment that divorce ought to be made more easy. In her opinion, it ought to be made more difficult.
"Why?" asked Mr. Nixon. He asked no more than that, but there was the weight of several royal commissions in the inquiry.
But Mary had the flame of war in her eyes. She knew what Mr. Nixon's opinions were, and she was heartily ashamed of them. On this subject she could make a very good show for herself, because she happened to feel strongly upon it.