all the afternoon."
Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! because, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league—didn't we, Mr. Bennett?—even you joined it."
Bennett smiled.
"Lady Maxwell overworks herself—we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven to his hostess.
"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her—it's our only hope."
"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady, smiling, to Lady Maxwell.
"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I ought to be kept in order—I become a terrible bore."
Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly subsided.
"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social work.' Why should I love my neighbour?—I'd much rather hate him. I generally do."
"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"
"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank—it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love—love—like that, long-drawn-out—how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'—till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty—something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"
"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the clergy had a mission."
"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if she were there!"
She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.
Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking—Tressady thought—of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.
She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right hand. "You're not taken in, I know."
"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady Leven, interrupting, "of course I do—I can't be left alone. I must dance as my generation pipes."
"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."
There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.
"How did you do it?—and whom did you bribe?" said Bayle to Lady Leven.
"I didn't bribe anybody," she said indignantly. "You don't understand. My friends introduced me."
Then, drawn out by him, she plunged into a lively account of her workshop experiences, interrupted every now and then by the sarcastic comments of her husband and the amusement of the two younger men who had brought their chairs close to her. Betty Leven ranked high among the lively chatterboxes of her day and set.
Lady Maxwell, however, had not laughed at Frank Leven's speech. Rather, as he spoke of his wife's experiences, her face had clouded, as though the blight of some too familiar image, some sad ever-present vision, had descended upon her.
Beimett also did not laugh. He watched the Levens indulgently for a few minutes, then insensibly he, Lady Maxwell, Edward Watton, and Tressady drew together into a circle of their own.
"Do you gather that Lord Fontenoy's speech on Friday has been much taken up in the country?" said Bennett, bending forward and addressing Lady Maxwell. Tressady, who was observing him, noticed that his dress was precisely the "Sunday best" of the respectable workman, and was, moreover, reminded by the expression of the eyes and brow that Bennett was said to have been a well-known "local preacher" in his north-country youth.
Lady Maxwell smiled, and pointed to Tressady.
"Here," she said, "is Lord Fontenoy's first-lieutenant."
Bennett looked at George.
"I should be glad," he said, "to know what Sir George thinks?"
"Why, certainly—we think it has been very warmly taken up," said George, promptly—"to judge from the newspapers, the letters that have been pouring in, and the petitions that seem to be preparing."
Lady Maxwell's eyes gleamed. She looked at Bennett silently a moment, then she said:
"Isn't it amazing to you how strong an impossible case can be made to look?"
"It is inevitable," said Bennett, with a little shrug, "quite inevitable. These social experiments of ours are so young—there is always a strong case to be made out against any of them, and there will be for years to come."
"Well and good," said George; "then we cavillers are inevitable too. Don't attack us—praise us rather; by your own confession, we are as much a part of the game as you are."
Bennett smiled slightly, but did not in reality quite follow. Lady Maxwell bent forward.
"Do you know whether Lord Fontenoy has any personal knowledge of the trades he was speaking about?" she said, in her rich eager voice; "that is what I want so much to find out."
George was nettled by both the question and the manner.
"I regard Fontenoy as a very competent person," he said drily. "I imagine he did his best to inform himself. But there was not much need; the persons concerned—whom you think you are protecting—were so very eager to inform us!"
Lady Maxwell flushed.
"And you think that settles it—the eagerness of the cheap life to be allowed to maim and waste itself? But again and again English law has stepped in to prevent it—and again and again everybody has been thankful."
"It is all a question of balance, of course," said George. "Must a few unwise people be allowed to kill themselves—or thousands lose their liberty?"
His blue eyes scanned her beautiful impetuous face with a certain cool hardness. Internally he was more and more in revolt against a "monstrous regiment of women" and the influence upon the most complex economic problems of such a personality as that before him.
But
