the trees were at their freshest and their most beautiful: the flowers were at their brightest, with great masses of rhododendron, purple lilac, and the golden rain of the laburnum. The Row was well filled: young men were there, riding bravely and gallantly with their sisters, their mothers, or their wives; girls and ladies were taking their morning canter before the official day began; and along the gravel-walks girls were hastening quickly to their offices or their lecture-rooms; older ladies sat in the shade, talking politics; idlers of both sexes were strolling and sitting, watching the horses or talking to each other.
‘Youth and hope!’ murmured the Professor. ‘Every lad hopes for a young wife; every girl trusts that success will come to her while she is still young enough to be loved. Age looks on with her young husband at her side, and prides herself in having no illusions left. Poor creatures! You destroyed love—love the consoler, love the leveller—when you, who were born to receive, undertook to give. Blind! blind!’
She turned from the window and began to examine the pictures hanging on the walls. These consisted entirely of small portraits copied from larger pictures. They were arranged in chronological order, and were in fact family portraits. The older pictures were mostly the heads of men, taken in the fall of life, gray-bearded, with strong, steadfast eyes, and the look of authority. Among them were portraits of ladies, chiefly taken in the first fresh bloom of youth.
‘They knew,’ said the Professor, ‘how to paint a face in those days.’
Among the modern pictures a very remarkable change was apparent. The men were painted in early manhood, the women at a more mature age; the style was altered for the worse, a gaudy conventional mannerism prevailed; there was weakness in the drawing and a blind following in the colour: as for the details, they were in some cases neglected altogether, and in others elaborated so as to swamp and destroy the subject of the picture. The faces of the men were remarkable for a self-conscious beauty of the lower type: there was little intellectual expression; the hair was always curly, and while some showed a bull-like repose of strength, others wore an expression of meek and gentle submissiveness. As for the women, they were represented with all the emblems of authority—tables, thrones, papers, deeds, and pens.
‘As if,’ said the Professor, ‘the peeresses’ right divine to rule was in their hearts! But, in these days, the painter’s art is a rule of thumb.’
There was a small stand full of books, chiefly of a lighter kind, prettily bound and profusely gilt. Some were novels, with such titles as The Hero of the Cricket Field, The Long Jump, The Silver Racket, and so on. Some were apparently poems, among them being Lady Longspin’s Vision of the Perfect Knight, with a frontispiece, showing the Last Lap of the Seven-Mile Race; Julia Durdle’s poems of the Young Man’s Crown of Glory, and Aunt Agatha’s Songs for Girls at School or College. There were others of a miscellaneous character, such as Guide to the Young Politician, being a series of letters to a peeress at Oxford; Meditations in the University Church; Hymns for Men; the Sacrifice of the Faithful Heart; The Womanhood of Heaven; or, the Light and Hope of Men, with many others whose title proclaimed the nature of their contents. The appearance of the books, however, did not seem to show that they were much read.
‘I should have thought,’ said the Professor, ‘that Constance would have turned all this rubbish out of her breakfast-room. After all, though, what could she put in its place here?’
As the clock struck eleven, the door opened, and the young lady whom the Professor spoke of as Constance appeared.
She was a girl of twenty, singularly beautiful, her face was one of those very rare faces which seem as if nature, after working steadily in one mould for a good many generations, has at last succeeded in perfecting her idea. Most of our faces, somehow, look as if the mould had not quite reached the conception of the sculptor. Unfortunately, while such faces as that of Constance, Countess of Carlyon, are rare, they are seldom reproduced in children. Nature, in fact, smashes her mould when it is quite perfect, and begins again upon another. The hair was of that best and rarest brown, in which there is a touch of gold when the sun shines upon it. Her eyes were of a dark, deep blue; her face was a beautiful and delicate oval; her chin was pointed; her cheek perhaps a little too pale, and rather thin; and there was a broad edging of black under her eyes, which spoke of fatigue, anxiety, or disappointment. But she smiled when she saw her guest.
‘Good morning, Professor,’ she said, kissing the wrinkled cheek. ‘It was good indeed of you to come. I only heard you were in town last night.’
‘You are well this morning, Constance?’ asked the Professor.
‘Oh, yes!’ replied the girl wearily. ‘I am well enough. Let us have breakfast. I have been at work since eight with my secretary. You know that we resign to-day.’
‘I gathered so much,’ said the Professor, ‘from the rag they call the Official Gazette. They do not report fully, of course, but it is clear that you had an exciting debate, and that you were defeated.’
The Countess sighed. Then she reddened and clenched her hands.
‘I cannot bear to think of it,’ she cried. ‘We had a disgraceful night. I shall never forget it—or forgive it. It was not a debate at all; it was the exchange of unrestrained insults, rude personalities, humiliating recrimination.’
‘Take some breakfast first, my dear,’ said the Professor, ‘and then you shall tell me as much as you please.’
Most of the breakfast was eaten by the Professor herself. Long before she had finished, Constance sprang from the table and began to pace the room in uncontrollable agitation.
‘It is hard—oh! it is very hard—to preserve even common dignity, when such attacks are made. One noble peeress taunted me with my youth. It is two years since I came of age—I am twenty—but never mind that. Another threw in my teeth my—my—my cousin Chester,’—she blushed violently; ‘to think that the British House of Peeresses should have fallen so low! Another charged me with trying to be thought the loveliest woman in London; can we even listen to such things without shame? And the Duchesse de la Vieille Roche’—here she laughed bitterly—‘actually had the audacity to attack my Political Economy—mine; and I was Senior in the Tripos! When they were tired of abusing me, they began upon each other. No reporters were present. The Chancellor, poor lady! tried in vain to maintain order; the scene—with the whole House, as it seemed, screeching, crying, demanding to be heard, throwing accusations, innuendoes, insinuations, at each other—made one inclined to ask if this was really the House of Peeresses, the Parliament of Great Britain, the place where one would expect to find the noblest representatives in the whole world of culture and gentlehood.’
Constance paused, exhausted but not satisfied. She had a good deal more to say, but for the moment she stood by the window, with flashing eyes and trembling lips.
‘The last mixed Parliament,’ said the Professor, thoughtfully—‘that in which the few men who were members seceded in a body—presented similar characteristics. The abuse of the liberty of speech led to the abolition of the Lower House. Absit omen!’
‘Thank Heaven,’ replied the Countess, ‘that it was abolished! Since then we have had—at least we have generally had—decorum and dignity of debate.’
‘Until last night, dear Constance, and a few similar last nights. Take care.’
‘They cannot abolish us,’ said Constance, ‘because they would have nothing to fall back upon.’
The Professor coughed dryly, and took another piece of
