The query was timidly whispered in the ear of Marcia Coryston by a veiled lady, who on the departure of some other persons had come to stand beside her.
"She is Mrs. Prideaux." said Miss Coryston, stiffly.
"The wife of the Prime Minister!" The voice showed emotion.
Marcia Coryston looked down upon the speaker with an air that said, "A country cousin, I suppose."
But she whispered, civilly enough: "Yes. She always sits in that corner. Weren't you here when he was speaking?"
"No—I've not long come in."
The conversation dropped, just as the voice of the orator standing on the left of the Speaker rose to his peroration.
It was a peroration of considerable eloquence, subtly graduated through a rising series of rhetorical questions, till it finally culminated and broke in the ringing sentences:
"Destroy the ordered hierarchy of English land, and you will sweep away a growth of centuries which would not be where it is if it did not in the main answer to the needs and reflect the character of Englishmen. Reform and develop it if you will; bring in modern knowledge to work upon it; change, expand, without breaking it; appeal to the sense of property, while enormously diffusing property; help the peasant without slaying the landlord; in other words, put aside rash, meddlesome revolution, and set yourselves to build on the ancient foundations of our country what may yet serve the new time! Then you will have an English, a national policy. It happens to be the Tory policy. Every principle of it is violated by the monstrous bill you have just brought in. We shall oppose it by every means and every device in our power!"
