"Dear Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?" she said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded—"But just think! The session will go on, every one says, till quite the end of September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes so much of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour of doing more for Labour. He thinks these Labour men might have been easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!"
"Oh!" said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the "friend of the poor." Alresford!—the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his own servants and estate were concerned. And as to Lady Selina, it was well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a maid to stay with her six months.
"What did you think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night?" said
Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.
"It was very interesting," said Marcella, stiffly—perfectly conscious that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and angry with her cheeks for reddening.
"Wasn't it?" said Lady Selina, heartily. "You can't do those things, of course! But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic young men—the men like that—shouldn't you? That's what my father says. He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us their friends—or we shall all go to ruin! They have the voting power—and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause—and at the same time give them our help—in reason—show them we want to be their friends—wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it rightly—you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67—can we? We must get round it somehow—mustn't we? And my father thinks Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"—and Lady Selina drew herself back with a more gracious smile than ever—"I ought not to be saying these things to you—of course I know you used to think us Conservatives very bad people—but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think quite so hardly of us as you used?"
Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle interrogative sort of way.
Something roused in Marcella.
"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated—"I wonder what you mean?"
"Well, I mean—" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl—"I mean, of course, the cause of the educated—of the people who have made the country."
"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich, don't you?"