'Nor can I!' she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. 'Much obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper's dress, and be ready to leave here at half-past seven.'
Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she would be asked, and let it alone.
'Will his wife be there?' asked Lady Charlotte.
'Who? Elsmere's? My dear aunt, when you happen to be the orthodox wife of a rising heretic, your husband's opinions are not exactly the spectacular performance they are to you and me. I should think it most unlikely.'
'Oh, she persecutes him, does she?'
'She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't!' observed Mr. Wynnstay, sotto voce. The small dark man was lost in a great armchair, his delicate painter's hands playing with the fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he subsided—for the moment.
Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a breeze. It had been just announced to the master of the house by his spouse that certain Socialist celebrities—who might any day be expected to make acquaintance with the police—were coming to dine at his table, to finger his spoons, and mix their diatribes with his champagne, on the following Tuesday. Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew perfectly well that when it came to the point he should smile more or less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the same sort before. But it had not yet come to the point, and his intermediate state was explosive in the extreme.
Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Elsmeres. Dropping his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate critical analysis of Catherine Elsmere's temperament and position, as in the course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to draw it out in words.
Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew's crisp phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this word-play of Hugh's. That 'good heart' of hers was touched; the large imperious face began to frown.
'Dear me!' she said, with a little sigh. 'Don't go on, Hugh! I suppose it's because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing's point of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,' she added, regaining her usual rôle of magisterial common-sense, 'a woman, in my opinion, ought to go with her husband in religious matters.'