“William is right,” said Lady Kenilworth with a glance at the bust, “and I am sure your daughter will say so too.”
Mrs. Massarene shook her head. “Kathleen is quite the other way, ma’am. She says we can’t be quality, and why should we pretend to; she angers her father terrible; to tell you the truth, she angers him so terrible that it was for that reason I gave in about this long visit to India.”
“She is not of her time then,” said Lady Kenilworth. “I am afraid she gets those ideas from Framlingham. He is a downright Radical.”
“I don’t know where she gets them,” said Mrs. Massarene drearily. “William always said the only comfort about a girl was that a girl couldn’t spite you in politics as a boy might; but if her ideas aren’t politics, and the worst sort of politics, I don’t know what is, and when you’ve kept a daughter ten years and more at school where nobody else goes as isn’t titled, it’s a cross as one doesn’t look for to have her turned out a Republican.”
Lady Kenilworth laughed with genuine mirth, which showed all her pretty teeth, white, and even and pointed like a puppy’s.
“Is she a Republican? Well, that is a popular creed enough now. I am not sure it wouldn’t get you on better than being on our side. The Radicals do such a lot for their people, and do it seriously without a grimace. We always”—“put our tongue in our cheek while we do it,” she was about to add, when a sense of the imprudence of her confession arrested her utterance of it. “I do wonder, you know, that you belong to us,” she hastened to add with that air of candor which so often stood her in good stead; “you would have found Hawarden easier of access than Hatfield.”
Margaret Massarene stared.
“But William’s principles, ma’am,” she murmured, “Church and State and Property; William says them three stand or fall together.”
“And he will hold them all up on his shoulders like a Caryatide,” said Lady Kenilworth, with her most winning smile.
Mrs. Massarene smiled too, blankly, because she did not understand, but gratefully, because she felt that a compliment was intended.