She moved to the bell by the side of the fireplace, and Norma and Morland shook hands with the conventional words of greeting.
“I hope you've had a good time abroad?”
“Oh, yes. The usual thing, the usual places, the usual people, the usual food. In fact, a highly successful pursuit of the usual. I've invented a verb—'to usualise.' I suppose you've been usualising too?”
The sudden sight of him had braced her, and instinctively she had adopted her old, cool manner as defensive armour. Her reply pleased him. There was something pungent in her speech, irreconcilable in her attitude, which other women did not possess. He was not physiognomist or even perceptive enough to notice the subtle change in her expression. He noted, as he remarked to her later, that she was “a bit off colour,” but he attributed it to the muggy weather, and never dreamed of regarding her otherwise than as radically the same woman who had engaged herself to many him in the summer. To him she was still the beautiful shrew whose taming appealed to masculine instincts. The brown hair sweeping up in a wave from the forehead, the finely chiselled sensitive features, the clear brown eyes, the mocking lips, the superb poise of the head, the stately figure perfectly set off in the dark blue tailor-made dress, all combined to impress him with a realisation of the queenliness of the presence that had grown somewhat shadowy of late to his unimaginative mental vision.
“And how do you like Parliament?” she asked casually, when the teacup had been brought and handed to him filled.
“I find it remarkably interesting,” he replied sententiously. “It is dull at times, of course, but no man can sit on those green benches and not feel he is helping to shape the destinies of a colossal Empire.”
“Is that what you really feel—or is it what you say when you are responding for the House of Commons at a public dinner?” asked Norma.
Morland hesitated for a moment between huffiness and indulgence. In spite of his former gibes at the stale unprofitableness of parliamentary life, he had always had the stolid Briton's reverence for our Institutions, and now that he was actually a legislator, his traditions led him to take himself seriously.
“I have become a very keen politician, I assure you,” he answered. “If you saw the amount of work that falls on me, you would be astonished. If it were n't for Manisty—that's my secretary, you know—I don't see how I could get through it.”
“I always wonder,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “how members manage to find time for anything. They work like galley-slaves for nothing at all. I regard them as simply sacrificing themselves for the public good.”