In the course of the next week or so Lady Brereton began to almost
believe the slander that she had herself sown over the very congenial
soil of London drawing-rooms; but though the town was soon as thick with
it as is a cornfield in May with the green springing spears, she was
afraid that her amiable object of revenging herself on Marie for the ill
turn she had done her in the matter of Maud's marriage had not been
blessed with the success which that masterly design deserved. Indeed,
had she not known from Jack that he had told his wife what he had
overheard at the "Deuce of Spades," Mildred could not have believed that
Marie knew anything at all about it, so utterly unaltered was her
demeanour to the world at large, and in particular to Jim Spencer. They
were constantly together, but, somehow, Marie's attitude to him and his
to her seemed in the eyes of people in general to contradict every
moment the possibility of there being any _dessous des cartes_ at all;
in fact, Mildred's springing blades had rather the appearance of having
been sown on stony ground: they seemed to her eye to look curiously
without stamina. Yet, as already stated, although in less than the
traditional nine days the world in general had ceased to concern itself
with so misbegotten a scandal, Lady Brereton almost began to believe it
herself. Her own invention, in fact, appeared probable to her; but its
effect on Marie, from which she had hoped so much, was entirely
unfruitful.
Lady Ardingly about this time, like an old war-horse now turned out to
grass, had begun to prick up her ears at the trumpets which resounded
through the land on the approach of the General Election. She, like many
other people, had a great belief in Jack's powers of awakening the
Government from the self-congratulatory torpor which had fallen on them.
"They sit in a somnolent circle," she said to him one day, "and awake at
intervals to shake hands with each other; then they go to sleep again.
Ardingly, perhaps, is the most sensible. He sleeps as soundly as
anybody, but he doesn't congratulate his noble colleagues."
Jack laughed.
"I almost wish I had always been a Liberal," he said.
"You always have been," said she; "but now is not the time to say so.
Get your seat in the Cabinet, Jack; the Conservative Cabinet is the only
opening for a Liberal nowadays. That is where Mr. Spencer makes his
mistake. To be a Liberal, however prominent, is nowadays to be perfectly
ineffective. You are put in a box and locked up, and the key is put in
the key-basket at--well, at a certain country-house. But if you are a
Conservative you are let out and given your own key. That is your
chance."
"And if they don't give me a seat in the Cabinet?"
"There will be no question about that. They do not like you, but they
are afraid of you. The country, on the other hand, likes you a good
deal. You have a way with plebeians. I don't know how you manage it.
They think you are a practical man, and just now they want practical
men, and they intend to get them. But you will have to be very careful
about certain things. I wanted to talk to you about those; that was why
I sent for you to have lunch with me alone. People were coming, but, in
fact, I put them off. We will go to my room."
Lady Ardingly rose, and Jack followed her. He was not quite sure that he
would like what was coming, but he was far too sensible to quarrel with
her, for he considered her quite the worst person in the world to
quarrel with.
"Yes, I am going to speak plainly," she said. "It is, I think, certain
that you will be offered the War Office. Now, you have a very clever
wife, who will be admirably useful to you; but you have a great friend
who is stupider than a mule, with all her _soi-disant_ brilliance. She
is _au fond_ a really vulgar woman, and it is vulgar people who make the
stupid mistakes. She has already made one, which might have damaged you
seriously, but I do not think it will. Of that presently. I was saying
that they will probably give you the War Office; but you cannot with any
usefulness retain the post for a day if there is a scandal connected
with you--a scandal, that is to say, of the wrong sort."
Jack leaned forward in his chair.
"I don't know why I do not resent this, Lady Ardingly," he said, "or
why I do not leave the room; but I do neither."
"Because you are a selfish, or at any rate an ambitious man," she said.
"Every one who is worth his salt is. Now I will put names to my advice."
* * * * *
She paused a moment to take some coffee, and waited till the man had
left the room.
"Mildred is a very vulgar woman," she said, "and her vulgarity shows
itself in the nature of her mistakes. Silly Billy came here the other
day, and I asked him about his scene with you. You did not score there,
and if he had not been a clever little fellow in a small sort of
bird-like manner, you would have involved yourself in a row of monstrous
proportions. He managed you in his microscopical way very successfully.
That is so. He also told me that it was Mildred who had suggested that
absurd canard to him. There is the stupidity of the woman. There was no
grain of sense in it all. Nobody who knows, would believe such things
about Marie for ten days together. But supposing some gutter-rag of a
paper had got hold of it! The wife of the man who was in the running for
the Cabinet prosecuting an intrigue with the Liberal candidate of his
division of Surrey! How charming! If I had wanted to ruin you, I should
have tried to think of something as damaging as that. If I had thought
of that I should have been quite content. Did you not see that, my poor
fellow?"
"We did not know he was standing at the time," said Jack rather feebly.
"Doubtless. But the secret of success in this world is not to make
blunders where one does not know. Any one can avoid blunders if he knows
everything. In any case, here is the position. It is sedulously
circulated that your wife has an intrigue with Jim Spencer. And who
circulates it? This cook! Luckily I did something to stop people
talking."
"What was that?"
"I told them I happened to know that Mildred had quarrelled with your
wife, and had invented this story out of revenge. That is the case, is
it not?"
"It certainly happens to be true. But I don't see how you knew."
"I guessed it was so," said Lady Ardingly. "It was the only reasonable
supposition. There is not another which holds water. Besides, if it had
not been true, what does it matter? Now, this is the first way in which
Mildred might have ruined you. The second concerns you also."
"I don't think we need discuss that," said Jack, who kept his temper
only by the knowledge that he would lose a great deal more if he lost
it.
"But we had better. You are a decent fellow, Jack; also it will amuse me
to see you in the Cabinet, which I shall not, unless you are careful.
Now, you have had an affair with Mildred for many years. At least, so we
all suppose; that we all suppose it is the important thing. I do not
mind that, morally speaking, because I am in no way responsible for your
morals. It is your own business. She happens to stimulate you. Everybody
knows about it except one person--your wife. Now, why not tell her?"
"For what reason?" asked Jack, far too much surprised to resent
anything.
"Simply for fear she should find out, and--and blow your ships out of
the water!" said Lady Ardingly. "You have fallen into a grave mistake.
You have treated your wife as a negligible quantity, whereas hardly
anybody is a negligible quantity, and certainly not she. That is by the
way. At present we are considering your career. Now, if Marie finds
out, either while you are still not yet in the Cabinet, or even after
that, before you have made yourself clearly felt to be indispensable,
you go. For if the middle class gets hold of a scandal about a Minister,
not yet proven, that man is beyond hope. He cannot weather the storm.
The middle class, who are, after all, the people, distrust his public
measures because they disapprove of his private life."
"Idiotic on their part," observed Jack.
"No doubt; but the cause of success is to estimate correctly and to take
advantage of the idiocy of others. None of us are clever in the way
Napoleon was clever. All we can do is to be slightly less idiotic than
the rest of mankind. Now you must go. I have a hundred things to do and
a thousand people to see. If I can be of any further help to you, let me
know."
Jack got up, then paused, indecisive.
"You mean you will tell Marie?" he asked.
"If you wish me to. But there is a simpler plan."
"What is that?" asked Jack.
"Show Mildred the door--the back-door," she added.
"I can't."
"Very good; that is your affair," said she. "But make up your mind soon
what you will do. Any line is better than none, as it was always."
At the moment a footman entered.
"Ask her to wait in the drawing-room," said Lady Ardingly, before he had
spoken. Then, without pausing: "Good-bye, Jack. Send me a line; or we
shall meet at Ascot, shall we not?"
Jack hesitated a moment.
"She is very obstinate," he said.
"Your wife?" asked Lady Ardingly.
"No; the person you asked to wait in the drawing-room."
Lady Ardingly laughed. She never minded being found out.
"So am I," she said. "Don't meet her on the stairs."
"Oh, I am not a fool!" said Jack, almost with gaiety.
"That may be true. But do not take your own wisdom as a working
hypothesis," said that immovable woman.
After he had left, Lady Ardingly proceeded to take her maximum exercise
for the day. This consisted in walking four times up and down the long
gallery of portraits which ran by the reception-rooms. It was nearly a
hundred yards in length, and as she stopped once to swallow a small
digestive pill, which was presented to her with a wine-glass of water by
her maid, it was nearly ten minutes before she returned to her room and
sent a message that the person who was waiting should be shown up. The
interval sufficed to pull her auburn wig straight and settle herself
with her back to the light.
Mildred was more accustomed to be waited for than to wait, and neither
Lady Ardingly's message that she wished to see her at 3.30 nor the
period of inaction in this drawing-room had improved a naturally
irritable temper. Her determination, in fact, when the tardy summons
came, was to be very effusive and full of engagements--a
delighted-to-see-you--how-well-you-are-looking--such-a-pleasure--must-go
attitude. Lady Ardingly often rubbed her up the wrong way, but she more
often gave her advice which, when she was cool, she knew to be right.
She conjectured, if no more, that the subject which was going to be
discussed was Jack, but was more than half decided not to discuss it. In
her mind, in fact, she labelled Lady Ardingly as an impotent old
meddler. Thus she entered.
"Ah, my dear," said Lady Ardingly, "you have been kept waiting, I am
afraid. It was an idiotic footman, who thought I was engaged, and did
not tell me you were here. How are you, Mildred?"
Mildred sat down. Her dress rustled incredulously.
"Driven," she said--"simply driven! How foolish one is to make a hundred
engagements a day, and not enjoy any because one is always thinking
about the next!"
"Yes, very foolish," said Lady Ardingly, "especially when one does not
enjoy them. Now tell me the news, dear Mildred. I do not go out and I
see nobody. You are always everywhere. I never saw a woman who sat in
the mainspring so much. Tell me all about everybody."
Insensibly Mildred felt mollified. She knew perfectly well that, though
Lady Ardingly did not rush about to see everybody, it was only because
everybody rushed about to see her; but still there was to her a faint
aroma of compliment about the speech. She disentangled a misshapen
Yorkshire terrier from her muff.
"Who, for instance?" she said. "Now, Jack--he is a friend of yours, I
know."
"Of both of ours," said Lady Ardingly with an intonation far more
confirmatory, than correcting.
"Yes--such a dear, isn't he? Well, people have been talking about him as
possibly going to the War Office. Dear Jack! I can scarcely imagine him
there."
"Yes, that is interesting," said Lady Ardingly. "So he means to take up
politics quite seriously. I am glad you have urged him to do that, and
that you have used your influence with him in that direction!"
Mildred continued to melt.
"Yes, Jack really has great talent," she said. "And he knows about guns
and smokeless powder, and--and that sort of thing, I believe. There is a
craze just now for people managing Departments of which they know
something. Quite new, isn't it?"
"Ah, you mean Ardingly," said the other. "How cruel of you!"
The liquefaction progressed.
"Dear Lady Ardingly!" said Mildred, "how can you say such a thing! Of
course I did not mean anything of the sort. But, seriously, I think
that Jack would do well at the War Office. Do not you?"
"Oh, he is not a fool! But it is necessary that he should have a wife.
Does one count Marie Alston as a wife, do you think?"
Mildred frowned quite naturally, and Lady Ardingly, though accustomed to
find her manoeuvres successful, was almost surprised at the success of
this.
"That reminds me," she said. "I wonder whether you have heard it? There
is going about a horrid, horrid scandal about Marie. It started, as far
as I know, in that Bridge club--'Deuce of Spades,' is it not? Well,
there one afternoon, about ten days ago, Silly Billy remarked that the
Snowflake had melted, referring to the matter. Everybody knew what he
meant, and Jack, as it happened, was in the room at the time. Was it not
awful? And it has gone all over London?"
Lady Ardingly sat up in her chair with the deliberation that
characterized all her movements, and took a cigarette from a tray. She
lighted it quite slowly without replying. It was time, she felt, to
begin taking the ribs out of this poor umbrella.
"Yes, I heard something of it," she said.
"Somebody told me something. But I gathered that it did not quite
originate there. I heard, in fact, dear Mildred, that you, driving to
that concert the other day, put the notion into Silly Billy's head."
"I don't know who can have told you that," she replied.
"Silly Billy did. Oh, I grant you that that is no guarantee at all for
its truth. I never see any reason to believe what Silly Billy says. But
you must now reckon with the story as it stands--as it reached me, in
fact: namely, that you told him the story which he very indiscreetly
repeated in Jack's hearing. You who know the world so well know that
people will not care if it is true. They will only repeat it as it
reached them, as it reached me."
"But I believe the story to be true," exclaimed Mildred, completely off
her guard.
"Ah! so you did tell him. The story, then, as I heard it is
substantially correct. Poor Silly Billy! How annoyed he would be if he
knew that he had been detected telling the truth! It would be deeply
humiliating to him. However, do not let us mind him; he is particularly
insignificant. Now, dear Mildred, why did you put that into his head?
Not that it matters why. But, anyhow, it was not nice of you."
"I did not intend it to be," said Mildred.
"Now you are talking sensibly. You quarrelled with her, and you wanted
to annoy her, I suppose. But is it possible that you do not see that in
annoying her you are injuring Jack with both hands?"
"In what way?"
"Perhaps you do not know that Jim Spencer is standing for the East
Surrey constituency as a Liberal. And where is Freshfield, the Alstons'
place? I have never been there, but I understand it is in East Surrey.
The Conservative magnate's wife has an intrigue with the Liberal
candidate! I said only just now to"--Lady Ardingly paused a moment--"to
myself, How damaging for Jack! How completely fatal for Jack!"
There was a short silence, and Lady Ardingly continued with the driest
deliberation.
"Of course, you had not heard that Jim Spencer was standing for that
division. There is nothing so dangerous as a complete absence of
knowledge. And it was you who started that scandal! It is lucky for you
it was such a silly one. If it had been a little cleverer, you might
have damaged him irretrievably."
"But there are lots of stories," began Mildred.
"Thousands. But not of that damaging kind. If you had said she was
having an intrigue, say, with the Emperor of Russia, it would have hurt
nobody, not even the Emperor. Never mind, dear, the thing is done. We
must consider how we can make the best of it. A scandal is always a
dangerous thing to touch. If one denies it afterwards, if even the
inventor, who believes it to be true--how ridiculous, too, of you, dear
Mildred!--denies it, there will always be people who think that the
denial merely confirms it. In this case it is peculiarly complicated.
The great thing is that the whole invention was so silly from the start.
I should have thought, dear Mildred, that you had a better imagination.
But you have not. It is not your fault; you cannot help it. What shall
we do, do you think?"
This old woman was not so impotent as Mildred had hoped. She had been
accustomed to consider herself fairly wide awake, but it appeared that
her waking moments were somnolence personified to Lady Ardingly.
"I don't know," she said feebly.
"Then, I will tell you," said Lady Ardingly. "Start a scandal--you
are so good at it--about yourself and Jim Spencer. Nothing
circumstantial--only let it be in the air. Let people say things; there
is nothing easier. Then it will appear also that you have broken with
Jack. That, I tell you, will not injure him. A married man is open to
damaging scandals in two ways: one through himself, one through his
wife. And in Jack's case, my dear, both these doors are flung wide, and
Lady Brereton enters through each, trumpeting like--like an elephant."
Lady Ardingly nodded her head at Mildred, with the air of a nurse
scolding a refractory child.
"Now, do not look so disconsolate, my dear," she went on, observing
Mildred's face falling as a barometer falls before a cyclone, "but just
bestir yourself. You should really in future consult somebody before you
embark on these efforts. You have dug a bottomless well, so I may say,
at the foot of the ladder by which your friend Jack was preparing to
mount. There is room--just room--to get him on to it still. But there is
only one way of doing it--that is, by stopping somehow or another that
very silly story you made up about his wife, and by taking very great
care how you are talked about in connection with him by the wrong
people--just now, perhaps, by anybody. You can do both these things by
letting it be supposed that you are _intime_ with Mr. Spencer. Let us
talk of something else."
Lady Ardingly rose with the air of closing the subject altogether. She
knew exactly when to stop rubbing a thing in, the object of that
salutary process being to make the place smart sufficiently, but not
unbearably. Mildred, she considered, was smarting enough.
"And about your tall daughter?" she said. "How does that go?"
"She is lovable, and he loves her; but he is not lovable, and she does
not love him," quoted Mildred, restraining quite admirably her impulse
to sulk or lose her temper.
"Ah! you must give her time. If he is really in love with her, he will
be very patient. And, since you love her," she added, without any change
of voice, "you will be patient with her, too."
Mildred got up.
"I must go," she said. "Thank you very much, Lady Ardingly. I have made
a mess of things."
"Yes, dear," said the other, "and you must wipe it up. Must you be
going? Some people are coming in for Bridge almost immediately. Please
dine here, if you can, to-day week. I will ask Mr. Spencer, and I will
not ask Jack. That is the day before we all go down to Ascot. I hope you
have backed Ardingly's horse for the Eclipse Stakes. Good-bye, dear."
Mildred went out, a limp figure, leaving Lady Ardingly looking like a
restored sphinx on the hearth-rug. Then she spoke to herself very gently
and slowly.
"I cannot bear cooks," she said, "and other people like them so much;
but I think I deserve a great many aces at Bridge."
Jack and Mildred went their respective ways full of thoughts, which up
to a certain point were very similar. Prominent, at any rate, in the
mind of each was that, though they knew each other very well, they would
not mention that they had had an interview with Lady Ardingly. Jack here
was in the superior position, since he knew that Mildred had succeeded
him in audience, and felt sure that, whether Mildred told him so or not,
he would find some impress of what had taken place in the next intimate
conversation they had together. With regard to his reflection on his own
interview, he saw the admirable justice of the greater part of Lady
Ardingly's views; he did not, however, see the fitness of telling Marie
anything whatever. This appeared to him a heroic remedy for a
contingency too remote to reckon with. He knew her, he told himself,
well enough to know that he did not know her at all, and she was quite
capable, as far as he was aware, of making what Lady Ardingly had called
"a row of monstrous proportions." This, as she had herself said just
now, at this juncture in his affairs would be fatal to him. She might
even petition for a divorce, in which case, as Lady Ardingly said, "he
went." There remained, as she had suggested, the other alternative of
giving up Mildred, of terminating the whole affair. He had told Lady
Ardingly he could not. At any rate, she was an invaluable friend; no
false notions of sentiment or altruism ever found their way into her
conversation. She advised from a flintily-logical, hard, worldly
standpoint.
At this point his reflections travelled off into ways utterly unknown to
her, and till lately unknown to himself; and even now he only groped
his path among them in a dim twilight. For he had said "I can't," not
from certainty of diagnosis, but from mere incredulity at his own
symptoms. His long intrigue with Mildred he had brought himself to
believe was necessary to him; he could not clearly picture any other way
of life. No less necessary, so he had always thought, was his aloofness
from Marie. But lately--dating, in point of fact, from the time of that
scene when he had told Marie what he had heard said at the "Deuce of
Spades"--he had been conscious of a change in himself as indefinable,
but as certain, as the first hint of dawn. Again, a pulse beat in him
which had long been dormant--the pulse that had throbbed in his arteries
when he was younger by more years than he cared to count, when women had
been to him, not the vehicle, but the deity, of passion. He had thrown
his earlier convictions in the mud, and in the conduct of his life had
trampled them under-foot; and now, at the end, like the trodden seeds of
wheat, they were already in ear. Marie's frank and honest contempt for
him had begun this process, for it had first jarred and disturbed, then
woke to activity some relaxed fibre which had long been overlaid by
grosser tissue, but was alive for all that.
Then, feebly at first, the knowledge of the "might-have-been" dawned on
him--that drug always bitter, and only sometimes salutary, producing in
some contrition and amendment, in others only recklessness. At present
it was bitter; but the bitterness was tonic. He could not yet tell
whether the "might-have-been" had passed into the "cannot-be." That
depended partly on himself, no doubt, but partly on her. And of her, out
of long familiarity, he knew nothing. Then, simultaneously with remorse,
or, at any rate, with his appreciation of her scorn for him, came in
another factor, his reawakened knowledge of her beauty--a low motive, it
may be, on which to base faithfulness or recall the unfaithful, but, as
long as men are men, a very real one. Yet for years he had sought
another woman, dimming the light of complete desire with the damp of
physical satiety. This other had ministered to the demands of the flesh,
she had also fulfilled that which lay immediately behind, for she had
supplied him always with a ready response to his more carnal ambitions:
she had flattered his own self-flattery. He had posed, as it were,
before a quantity of mirrors, sometimes convex, sometimes concave, which
had showed him himself now taller, now shorter, than he was. But she had
never shown him himself, still less any ideal of what he might be. Then,
still touching the same spot, had come Lady Ardingly's gentle
classification of Mildred as a cook, made, not with the air of
discovery, but merely as a passing allusion to what both knew. A cook,
that was all.
Mildred's reflections were far simpler to follow, and far less
disquieting. No doubt she had made a mistake about the scandal she had
tried to start about Marie, and it was a comfort to think that Lady
Ardingly's remarks about the silliness of it being its own doom were
true. Meantime it would be amusing to "run" Jim Spencer for a while, and
she felt sure that, even if she could not do it, she could easily convey
the impression that she was doing it. On the whole, she would not tell
Jack she had seen Lady Ardingly (this was unnecessary, for he knew), and
the rest of her meditation was composed of a sense of holding Jack's
rein, whatever Lady Ardingly might say, and a superb determination to do
her unselfish best for him. She was, as a matter of fact, hopelessly
incapable of doing anything unselfish, but a benignant Providence having
denied her the possibility of altruism, spared her also the humiliation
of the knowledge of its absence.
It so happened that they met the next evening at an omnibus kind of
party at Arthur Naseby's, a bachelor host. He was a man of strange and
wayward tastes, and you were liable to meet a Sioux Indian in feathers
there one week, and a missionary who had crossed Africa and been eaten,
so he would explain, by cannibal tribes, the next. In his way he was an
admirable host, and, before introducing any one of his guests to
another, hissed into his ear a rapid _précis_ of the chief events of the
other's life. These were sometimes wildly enigmatical, as when he
murmured: "Frightful scandal just five years ago. Her uncle found dead
in the Underground--probably blackmail. Cut for years afterwards. Don't
allude to first-class carriages. Daughter of old Toby Fairbank--mother a
Jewess." But, as a rule, his information was a help to the newly
introduced, and he always pronounced their names loudly and distinctly,
instead of murmuring inaudibly. To-night the party centred round a
gifted French actress, who recited several poems in a most melodious
voice and with a childlike air which was quite killing to those who knew
what she was talking about. Later on there was Bridge, owing to the
repeated demands of Lady Ardingly, and Jack and Mildred having cut out,
it was quite natural that they should have a talk together in a somewhat
secluded window-seat.
"You are getting on, Jack," said she. "I should not be the least
surprised if there was a boom in you, as Andrew would say. Dear Andrew!
he always remembers my birthday, while I always strive to forget it. One
has so many. But he gave me these pearls. Are they not pretty? Yes,
Jack, you are booming. You are in the air!"
"That is always rather a nuisance," remarked Jack. "One can't help
wanting to assure people that a close inspection will not repay them."
"I don't think you need mind much. People are disposed to take a
favourable view of you. You must manage to keep it up. The time of pigs
and shorthorns is here," she said with a sigh. "Look: there is Silly
Billy talking to Marie! She appears completely unconscious of his
presence."
"She probably is, for I don't think she ever poses."
"There is faint praise in your voice," said Mildred.
"Undesignedly. At least, I had no intention of doing the other thing. By
the way, I disquieted myself in vain over the Silly Billy episode, I
think. It has not caught on."
"Nobody talked about anything else for three days," said Mildred, with a
mother's protective instinct for her offspring. "You didn't suppose they
would talk to you about it! But I am magnanimous enough to be glad it
has dropped, Jack. It is very important--particularly important, I
think--that you should have no joint in your harness just now. You will
probably get into the Cabinet, upon which the searchlights will be
turned on. I feel this strongly. I have meant to say it to you for--for
some time."
He looked at her for a moment without replying.
"She caught it hot," he said to himself, not without satisfaction, for
he saw vividly the truth of Lady Ardingly's estimate of her folly.
"I feel it, too," he said; and, though they agreed, a discordant note
was definitely struck, and vibrated very audibly to the inward ear,
with its own-widening harmonics.
"I am glad! As you implied to me not long ago, Cæsar's wife must be
above suspicion. It was not very convincing to me then. But it is now.
Also, Jack, it is best that Cæsar should not inspire spicy paragraphs in
the gutter press."
Jack felt unreasonably irritated. The cook spoke here.
"Have you some scandal to tell me about myself," he asked, "also
invented by you?"
"No. But why show temper?"
"Because you irritate me when you speak like that."
Mildred felt suddenly a little uncomfortable; she had a sense of
uncertain grip.
"Really, Jack, you are very ungrateful!" she said. "I am taking all the
trouble of sitting with you in the corner, and thinking of a hundred
things for your good, which would never have occurred to you, and you
merely tell me that I irritate you!"
"Well, what is it?" he replied.
She rose, really annoyed.
"I will leave you to find out for yourself," she said.
"You are sufficiently lucid. You have stated what you mean quite
clearly. You will leave me. I have found out for myself. So shall we
discuss it?"
She had made a false move, and knew it. There was some indefinable
change about Jack, which she recognised though she could not analyze it.
But the prospect of losing him, even temporarily, on his initiative, was
quite another matter to doing it on her own.
"Yes, that is what I mean," she said, sitting down again. "I made a
mess, or I might have made one, over that other affair, and I see now
that it might have been very injurious to you, especially since Jim
Spencer is standing as a Liberal for East Surrey. Did you know that, by
the way?"
"Oh, yes. He talked to me about it. It was not wise of you."
"Well, luckily there is no harm done. The thing didn't catch on. But the
point is to avoid other dangers. And for the present I am dangerous to
you, Jack. People won't begin talking again unless they get fresh cause.
Do not let us give them fresh cause."
"I quite agree with you," said he.
Mildred liked this less and less. She had imagined that he would want a
lot of talking round and reasoning with, and it did not flatter her at
all to find him so placidly in accord with her. Yet she had no tangible
ground of complaint.
"So that is all right," she said. "Ah, here is Marie. Marie, whenever I
see you in that pink dress, I think it is morning."
"It is nearly," said she. "Jack, I am going home. Are you stopping to
play?"
He rose.
"No, I will come with you," he said.
Marie looked a little surprised.
"Stop by all means if you feel inclined," she said. "I will send the
carriage back for you."
Mildred laughed.
"Mutual confidence of the very first water," she observed.
Again the cook _motif_ sounded, setting his teeth on edge.
"No, I will come with you, Marie," he repeated.