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"And it's all so awkward, isn't it?" she said, with sympathy, "when apparently Lady Parham is as much Prime Minister as he is." For in those days certain great houses and political ladies, though not at the zenith of their power, were still, in their comparative decline, very much to be reckoned with.
"Is Lord Parham behaving well to you now William?" Ashe colored hotly. As a matter of fact, in his own opinion, Lord Parham was behaving vilely. A measure of first-rate importance for which he was responsible was already in danger of being practically shelved, simply, as it seemed to him, from a lack of elementary trustworthiness in Lord Parham.
Kitty hesitated then said, with the prettiest, slightest laugh: "Lady Parham has such strong views hasn't she? on Church questions!" Lord Parham's feeling was that a more insidiously impertinent question had never been put to him. He drew himself up. "If she has, Lady Kitty, I can only say I know very little about them! She very wisely keeps them to herself."
The tie between Crabbe and Miss Elmy was further strengthened by a dangerous fever from which Crabbe suffered in 1778-79, while Miss Elmy was a guest under his parents' roof. This was succeeded by an illness of Miss Elmy, when Crabbe was in constant attendance at Parham Hall.
And even Lord Parham, much as he disliked her, acknowledged, during the early courses, that she was handsome, and in her own way thank God! it was not the way of any womankind belonging to him good company. He saw, too, or thought he saw, that she was anxious to make him amends for her behavior of the afternoon. She restrained herself, and talked politics.
Lady Tranmore expressed her gratification with all the dignity she could command, conscious meanwhile that her companion was not listening to a word, absorbed as she was in a hawklike examination of the room through a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses. Suddenly the eye-glasses fell with a rattle. "Good Heavens!" cried Lady Parham. "Do you see who that is talking to Mr. Loraine?"
"I say, Kitty," said Ashe, bending over her and speaking in her small ear, "I thought Lady Parham was eternally obliged to us. What's wrong with her?" "Only that I can't stand her," said Kitty. "What's the good of trying?" She looked up, a flame of mutiny in her cheeks. "What, indeed?" said Ashe, feeling as reckless as she. "Her manners are beyond the bounds.
He'll never ask me to help him he'll find ways not to though he'll be very sweet to me all the time." And the thought of her nullity with him in the future, her insignificance in his life, tortured her. Why had she treated Lord Parham so? "I can be a lady when I choose," she said, mockingly, to herself. "I wasn't even a lady."
Margaret paused, with her hand on the back of Lady Tranmore's chair, and there was a short silence. Then Lady Tranmore began, in a tone that endeavored not to be too serious: "I don't know how you're going to get out of it, my dear. Lady Parham has asked the Princess, first because she wished to come, secondly as an olive-branch to you.
And within the lines he always observed when talking to women, lines dictated by a contempt innate and ineradicable, Lord Parham was quite ready to talk politics too. Then it suddenly struck him that she was pumping him, and with great adroitness. Ashe, he knew, wanted an early place in the session for a particular measure in which he was interested.
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