“My dear man,” she replied cuttingly, “if I were looking out for a lover, this time I should take a young one.”
She laughed scornfully and swept away. Long smouldering resentment had been suddenly fanned into the flame of open hostility. She raged in her heart against him. Never before had he dared to insinuate such a taint in her political interest in any man. She, Lady Edna Donnithorpe, to carry on an intrigue with John Baltazar—the insult of it!
The next day brought a short but fierce encounter.
“You pretend to be jealous. You’re not. You’re envious. You’re envious of a bigger man than yourself. You’re afraid of him. You little minnows hate Tritons. I quite understand.”
In the wrath of a weak and foolish man he sputtered unforgettable words which no woman ever forgives. She faced him with lips as thin as his own, and her languorous eyes hardened into little dots of jade.
“You had better see to it that I don’t break you,” she said.
“Break me? How? Politically?” He laughed a thin laugh of derision. “In the first place you couldn’t. In the second you wouldn’t. What would become of your position if I were out of the Government?”
“I can very well look after myself,” she replied.
On Saturday morning he made some apology for loss of temper which she coldly accepted on condition of his courteous treatment of John Baltazar. And so it fell that, when the subject of all this to-do arrived at Moulsford, he found himself almost effusively welcomed by the negative Edgar, and thrust into the inner circle of the High and Mightinesses assembled. As the latter took Baltazar very seriously as a coming power in the country, and as Lady Edna’s attitude towards him was marked by no especial characteristic, Edgar Donnithorpe came to the unhappy conclusion that he had made a fool of himself, and during the informal discussion on the creation of the new Ministry, for which purpose the week-end party had gathered together, he had dared do little more than “just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike” when Baltazar’s name was mentioned. Which pusillanimity coming to his wife’s ears, deepened her resentment against him; and only Baltazar’s triumphal exit on the Monday morning restrained her from giving it practical expression. Sufficient for the day was the success thereof.
In the lazy punt, that gracious Spring morning, she strove to drive the last week-end from her thoughts. She revelled in the unusual and the audacious. Edgar had gone to Paris on an international conference. Only an ancient and faded Aunt, Lady Lætitia Vardon, a sort of permanent aristocratic caretaker, was in the house; Godfrey the sole guest. And Aunt Lætitia had caught a God-sent cold and was staying in bed. They two had the whole bright day before them, and the scented evening, with never a soul to obtrude on their idyllic communion. She had always snapped her fingers at convention. But, Lady Edna Donnithorpe, chartered libertine, had always observed the terms of her charter, her heart never having tempted her to break them. This delicious breach was a different matter altogether. She had even dared to put off two or three previously invited friends. . . .