"I repeat—you propose to me, Arthur, a bargain which is no bargain!—"
"A quid without a quo?" interrupted Coryston, who had suddenly dropped his argument with Sir Wilfrid, and had thrown himself on a sofa near his mother and Arthur.
Lady Coryston took no notice of him. She continued to address her youngest-born.
"What Coryston may do—now—after all that has passed is to me a matter of merely secondary importance. When I first saw the notice of the Martover meeting it was a shock to me—I admit it. But since then he has done so many other things—he has struck at me in so many other ways—he has so publicly and scandalously outraged family feeling, and political decency—"
"I really haven't," said Coryston, mildly. "I haven't—if this was a free country."
Lady Coryston flashed a sudden superb look at him and resumed:
"—that I really don't care what Coryston does. He has done his worst. I can't suffer any greater insult than he has already put upon me—"
Coryston shook his head, mutely protesting. He seized a pen from a table near, and began to bite and strip it with an absent face.
"But you, Arthur!" his mother went on with angry emphasis, "have still a character to lose or gain. As I have said, it doesn't now matter vitally to me whether Coryston is in the chair or not—I regard him as merely Glenwilliam's cat's-paw—but if you let this meeting at Martover pass, you will have weakened your position in this constituency, you will have disheartened your supporters, you will have played the coward—and you will have left your mother disgracefully in the lurch—though that latter point I can see doesn't move you at all!"
James and Sir Wilfrid Bury came anxiously to join the group. Sir Wilfrid approached the still standing and distressed Marcia. Drawing her hand within his arm, he patted it kindly.