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You know my sister, I think Lady Alice Mountgarron? Aunt, may I present Mr. Tallente the Countess of Somerham. Mrs. Ward Levitte Lady English oh! and Colonel Fosbrook." Tallente made the best of a very disappointing situation.
"If there is a revolution within the next fifteen years," Tallente said, "I think it will probably be on behalf of the disenfranchised aristocracy, who want the vote back again." Lady English and Mrs. Levitte found something else to talk about between themselves. Lady Somerham, however, had no intention of letting Tallente escape.
"I am waiting to hear from him," she answered, "whether he prefers to dine here or to take me out." His ill-humour vanished, and with it some of his stiffness of bearing. His farewell bow from the door to Lady Somerham was distinguished with a new affability. "If we may be alone," he said softly, "I should like to come here."
He made his adieux to Jane and departed, and to Tallente's joy a break-up of the party seemed imminent. Mrs. Ward Levitte drifted out and Lady English followed suit. Lady Somerham also rose to her feet, but after a glance at Tallente sat down again. "My dear Jane," she insisted, "you must dine with us to-night.
He exchanged bows with his new acquaintances, declined tea and was at once taken possession of by Lady Somerham, a formidable-looking person in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, with a rasping voice and a judicial air. "So you are the Mr. Tallente," she began, "who Somerham tells me has achieved the impossible!"
"Somerham says that Dartrey is a dreamer," the Countess went on, "that you are the man of affairs and the actual head of them all." "Your husband magnifies my position," Tallente assured her. Mrs. Ward Levitte, the wife of a millionaire and a woman of vogue, leaned forward and addressed him. "Do set my mind at rest, Mr. Tallente," she begged.
Jane enquired mildly. "Your Aunt Somerham brought it round this morning while I was in bed," her mother replied. "It was a great shock to me. Also to your father. He was anxious to come with me but is threatened with an attack of gout." "And what do you want to say to me about it? Just why did you bring me that rag and show me those paragraphs?"
"You are a neighbour of my niece in Devonshire, I believe?" she asked. He admitted the fact monosyllabically. He was supremely uncomfortable, and it seemed to him that Jane, who was conducting an apparently entertaining conversation with Colonel Fosbrook, might have done something to rescue him. "My niece has very broad ideas," Lady Somerham went on.
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