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In a sense, it was perfectly true that she had insulted her husband's chief, and jeopardized her husband's policy, because she could not put up with Lord Parham's white eyelashes. Well, let him make his account with it! How to love her, tend her, make her happy and yet carry on himself the life of high office there was the problem!
Well, if the father, poor fellow, had been distinguished in his day, the son had gone far beyond him. The Dean ruminated on a conversation wherewith he had just beguiled his cup of tea at the Athenæum a conversation with one of the shrewdest members of Lord Parham's cabinet, a "new man," and an enthusiastic follower of Ashe. "Ashe is magnificent! At last our side has found its leader. Oh!
"I think that came ten days ago," he said, quietly. "I imagined Kitty accepted it." "I never thought of it from that day to this," said Kitty, who had clasped her hands behind her head and was staring at the ceiling. "Say, please, that" she spaced out the words deliberately "Mr. and Lady Kitty Ashe are unable to accept Lord and Lady Parham's invitation etc.
And the wrinkled face and harsh lips fell into a contortion meant for a confidential smile; while through it all the eyes, wholly independent, studied the face beside her closely, suspiciously until the owner of it in her discomfort could almost have repeated aloud the words that were ringing in her mind "I shall not go to Lady Parham's! My note will reach her on the stroke of eight."
A coalition between the Tories and certain dissident Liberals had turned out Lord Parham's government in the course of a stormy autumn session, some eight months before. It had been succeeded by a weak administration, resting on two or three loosely knit groups with Ashe as leader of the Opposition. Hence his comparative freedom, and the chance to be his mother's escort.
Because, you know I can't live up to it. I know it's her doing bless her! that old Parham's going to give me this thing. And it's a perfect scandal!" "What nonsense, William!" "It is!" he maintained, springing up and standing before her, with his hands in his pockets. "They're going to offer me the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs, and I shall take it, I suppose, and be thankful.
You imagined that that sketch of Lord Parham" he struck the open page "a sketch written by my wife, describing my official chief when he was my guest under my own roof with all sorts of details of the most intimate and offensive kind mocking his speech his manners his little personal ways charging him with being the corrupt tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not to be trusted and justifying all this by a sort of evidence that you could only have got as my wife and Lord Parham's hostess you actually supposed that you could write and publish that! without in the first place its being plain to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you had written it and in the next, without making it impossible for your husband to remain a colleague of the man you had treated in such a way?
His interrogative smile was not wholly good-natured. But mere benevolence was not what the world asked of Philip Darrell even in the case of his old friends. "Astonishing!" said Mrs. Alcot, with lifted brows. "Kitty is immensely proud of him and immensely ambitious. That, of course, accounts for Lord Parham's visit." "Lord Parham!" cried Darrell, bounding on his seat. "Lord Parham! coming here?"
He had emerged from it after a series of speeches laying down the principles and vindicating the action of his party one of the most important men in England, with whom Lord Parham himself must henceforth treat on quasi-equal terms. Ashe was now Home Secretary, and, if Lord Parham's gout should take an evil turn, there was no saying to what height fortune might not soon conduct him.
No young member on the government side, if he wanted office, neglected Lady Parham's invitations, and admission to her more intimate dinners was still almost as much coveted as similar favors had been a generation before in the case of Lady Jersey, or still earlier, in that of Lady Holland. She was a small old woman, with a shrewish face, a waxen complexion, and a brown wig.
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