"I am all right," said Lady Lucy, hastily. "Like you, I hate east winds. Oliver, I have had a charming letter from Mr. Heath."
Mr. Heath had been for some months Marsham's local correspondent on the subject of the new Liberal hall in the county town. Lady Lucy had recently sent a check to the Committee, which had set all their building anxieties at rest.
Oliver looked down rather moodily upon her.
"It's pretty easy to write charming letters when people send you money. It would have been more to the purpose, I think, if they had taken a little trouble to raise some themselves!"
Lady Lucy flushed.
"I don't suppose Dunscombe is a place with many rich people in it," she said, in a voice of protest, as she passed him. Her thoughts hurt her as she mounted the stairs. Oliver had not received her gift--for, after all, it was a gift to him--very graciously. And the same might have been said of various other things that she had tried to do for him during the preceding months.
As to Marsham, while he dressed, he too recalled other checks that had been recently paid for him, other anxious attempts that had been made to please him. Since Diana had vanished from the scene, no complaisance, no liberality had been too much for his mother's good-will. He had never been so conscious of an atmosphere of money--much money. And there were moments--what he himself would have described as morbid moments--when it seemed to him the price of blood; when he felt himself to be a mere, crude moral tale embodied and walking about. Yet how ridiculous! What reasonable man, knowing what money means, and the power of it, but must have flinched a little under such a test as had been offered to him? His flinching had been nothing final or damnable. It was Diana, who, in her ignorance of the world, had expected him to take the sacrifice as though it were nothing and meant nothing--as no honest man of the world, in fact, could have taken it.
When Marsham descended he found Alicia already in possession of the drawing-room. Her gown of a brilliant shade of blue put the room out of joint, and beside the startling effect of her hair, all the washed-out decoration and conventional ornament which it contained made a worse effect than usual. There was nothing conventional or effaced about Alicia. She had become steadily more emphatic, more triumphant, more self-confident.
"Well, what have you been doing with yourself?--nothing but politics?" The careless, provocative smile with which the words were accomplished roused a kind of instant antagonism in Marsham.