"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all the Radicals—the well-to-do Radicals I mean—to live among the poor? It seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"
Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her impertinently. She looked round quickly.
"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"
"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I suppose it teaches a person to be content—and not to cry for the moon!"
"You think," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can teach any one—any one that's human—to be content!"
Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation—without pose. At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.
Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior. She drew herself up.
"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."
Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head.
She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.
"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it—on the whole—to us West End people?"