“I can make a row,” he admitted. “But perhaps Germain won’t like that.”
“I am sure he will like whatever you do,” said she. Duplessis made no answer, but did not shirk the reflection that, if he did, it would indicate a striking change in the gentleman’s views.
At this moment a fair-haired young lady in a riding-habit—Miss Nina Swetebrede of Copestake—came in, craving tea. She distributed her nods and smiles on either hand as she advanced to the table. “Dear Mary, I’m so tired,” she pleaded. “Do feed me, and make a fuss of me, and I shall love you.” The newly arrived gentlemen were made known to her, and Mr. Jess courtly and tenderly jocular, ministered to her needs. She annexed him without scruple. This left Duplessis in possession of the tea-table. But the attack was Mary’s.
“So you have taken to politics in earnest?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know that I’m in earnest. That’s putting politics rather high. The game is as good as another.”
She might have known that he would never admit earnestness—to her. But she felt snubbed.
“The fact is,” he went on, “that either every side in politics is partly right, in which case it’s only common honesty to say so—or that all sides are entirely wrong, which means that only rascals can succeed at it. So that, in any event, one must be more or less of a rogue.”
She ventured a little laugh. “I know what you mean—or think I do. I know more about politics than I did—once.”
He parried that. “One gets to know something, of course. You talk of nothing else here, I suppose?”
There seemed to be a sting in this. Loyalty must meet it. “But indeed we do—” she began, and he saved the position for her by saying that he wished he could say the same for himself. “But there’ll be no chance of rational conversation,” he told her, “until that fellow’s safely in the Home Office.”