make friends with people—the lower orders—by shaking hands with them, showing them Burne-Jones's pictures, and singing 'The Messiah' with them. I had the same idea once. Everybody had. It was like the measles. But the sensible persons have got over it."
"Thank you, mamma," said Watton, making her a smiling bow.
Lady Tressady interrupted her talk with the squire at the other end of the table to observe what was going on. She had been chattering very fast in a shrill, affected voice, with a gesticulation so free and French, and a face so close to his, that the nervous and finicking squire had been every moment afraid lest the next should find her white fingers in his very eyes. He felt an inward spasm of relief when he saw her attention diverted.
"Is that Mr. Edward talking his Radicalism?" she asked, putting up a gold eyeglass—"his dear, wicked Radicalism? Ah! we all know where Mr. Edward got it."
The table laughed. Harding Watton looked particularly amused.
"Egeria was in this neighbourhood last week," he said, addressing Lady Tressady. "Edward rode over to see her. Since then he has joined two new societies, and ordered six new books on the Labour Question."
Edward flushed a little, but went on eating his dinner without any other sign of disturbance.
"If you mean Lady Maxwell," he said good-humouredly, "I can only be sorry for the rest of you that you don't know her."
He raised his handsome head with a bright air of challenge that became him, but at the same time exasperated his mother.
"That woman!" said Mrs. Watton with ponderous force, throwing up her hands as she spoke. Then she turned to Lord Fontenoy. "Don't you regard her as the source of half the mischievous work done by this precious Government in the last two years?" she asked him imperiously.
A half-contemptuous smile crossed Lord Fontenoy's worn face.
"Well, really, I'm not inclined to make Lady Maxwell the scapegoat. Let them bear their own misdeeds."
"Besides, what worse can you say of English Ministers than that they should be led by a woman?" said Mr. Watton, from the bottom of the table, in a piping voice. "In my young days such a state of things would have been unheard of. No offence, my dear, no offence," he added hastily, glancing at his wife.
Letty glanced at George, and put up a handkerchief to hide her own merriment.
Mrs. Watton looked impatient.
"Plenty of English Cabinet Ministers have been led by women before now," she said drily; "and no blame to them or anybody else. Only in the old days you knew where you were. Women were corrupt—as they were meant to be—for their husbands and brothers and sons. They wanted something for somebody—and got it. Now they are corrupt—like Lady Maxwell—for what they are pleased to call 'causes,' and it is that which will take the nation to ruin."
At this there was an incautious protest from Edward Watton against the word "corrupt," followed by a confirmatory clamour from his mother and brother which seemed to fill the dining-room. Lady Tressady threw in affected comments from time to time, trying hard to hold her own in the conversation by a liberal use of fan and Christian names, and little personal audacities applied to each speaker in turn. Only Edward Watton, however, occasionally took civil or smiling notice of her; the others ignored her. They were engaged in a congenial task, the hunting of the one disaffected and insubordinate member of their pack, and had for the moment no attention to spare for other people.
"I shall see the great lady, I suppose, in a week or two," said George to Miss Sewell, under cover of the noise. "It is curious that I should never have seen her."
"Who? Lady Maxwell?"
"Yes. You remember I have been four years out of England. She was in town, I suppose, the year before I left, but I never came across her."
"I prophesy you will like her enormously," said Letty, with decision. "At least, I know that's what happens to me when Aunt Watton abuses anybody. I couldn't dislike them afterwards if I tried."
"That, allow me to impress upon you, is not my disposition! I am a human being—I am influenced by my friends."
He turned round towards her so as to appropriate her again.
"Oh! you are not at all the poor creature you paint yourself!" said Letty, shaking her head. "In reality, you are the most obstinate person I know—you can never let a subject alone—you never know when you're beaten."
"Beaten?" said George, reflectively; "by a headache? Well, there is no disgrace in that. One will probably 'live to fight another day.' Do you mean to say that you will take no notice—no notice—of all that array of facts I laid before you this morning on the subject of Captain Addison?"
"I shall be kind to you, and forget them. Now, do listen to Aunt Watton! It is your duty. Aunt Watton is accustomed to be listened to, and you haven't heard it all a hundred times before, as I have."
Mrs. Watton, indeed, was haranguing her end of the table on a subject that clearly excited her. Contempt and antagonism gave a fine energy to a head and face already sufficiently expressive. Both were on a large scale, but without commonness. The old-lace coif she wore suited her waved and grizzled hair, and was carried with conscious dignity; the hand, which lay beside her on the table, though long and bony, was full of nervous distinction. Mrs. Watton was, and looked, a tyrant—but a tyrant of ability.
"A neighbour of theirs in Brookshire," she was saying, "was giving me last week the most extraordinary account of the doings at Mellor. She was the heiress of that house at Mellor"—here she addressed young Bayle, who, as a comparative stranger in the house, might be supposed to be ignorant of facts which everybody else knew—"a tumbledown place with an income of about two thousand a year. Directly she married she put a Socialist of the most unscrupulous type—so they tell me—into possession. The man has established what they call a 'standard rate' of wages for the estate—practically double the normal rate—coerced all the farmers, and made the neighbours furious. They say the whole district is in a ferment. It used to be the quietest part of the world imaginable, and now she has set it all by the ears. She, having married thirty thousand a year, can afford her little amusements; other people, who must live by their land, have their lives worried out of them."
"She tells me that the system works on the whole extremely well," said Edward Watton, whose heightened colour alone betrayed the irritation of his mother's chronic aggression, "and that Maxwell is not at all unlikely to adopt it on his own estate."
Mrs. Watton threw up her hands again.
"The idiocy of that man! Till he married her he was a man of sense. And now she leads him by the nose, and whatever tune he calls, the Government must dance to, because of his power in the House of Lords."
"And the worst of it is," said Harding Watton, with an unpleasant laugh, "that if she were not a handsome woman, her influence would not be half what it is. She uses her beauty in the most unscrupulous way."
"I believe that to be entirely untrue," said Edward Watton, with emphasis, looking at his brother with hostility.
George Tressady interrupted. He had an affection for Edward Watton, and cordially disliked Harding. "Is she really so handsome?" he asked, bending forward and addressing his hostess.
Mrs. Watton scornfully took no notice.
"Well,
