"Sorry! Mother!"—his laughing eyes pursued her—"do you want to marry me off directly? I know you do!"
"I want nothing but what you yourself should want. Of course you must marry."
"The young women don't care two-pence about me!"
"William!—be a bear if you like, but not an idiot!"
"Perfectly true," he declared—"not the dazzlers, and the high-fliers—the only ones it would be an excitement to carry off."
"You know very well," she said, slowly, "that now you might marry anybody."
He threw his head back rather haughtily.
"Oh, I wasn't thinking about money and that kind of thing. Well, give me time, mother—don't hurry me! And now I'd better stop talking nonsense, change my clothes, and be off. Good-by, dear—you shall hear when the job's perpetrated!"
"William, really!—don't say these things—at least to anybody but me. You understand very well"—she drew herself up rather finely—"that if I hadn't known, in spite of your apparent idleness, you would do any work they set you to do, to your own credit and the country's, I'd never have lifted a finger for you!"
William Ashe laughed out.
"Oh, intriguing mother!" he said, stooping again to kiss her. "So you admit you did it?"
He went off gayly, and she heard him flying up-stairs three steps at a time, as though he were still an untamed Eton boy, and there were no three weeks' hard political fighting behind him, and no interview which might decide his life before him.
He entered his own sitting-room on the second floor, shut the door behind him, and glanced round him with delight. It was a large room looking on a wide street, and obliquely to the park. Its walls were covered with books—books which almost at first sight betrayed to the accustomed eye that they were the familiar companions of a student. Almost every volume had long paper slips inside it, and when opened would have been found to contain notes and underlinings in a somewhat reckless and destructive abundance. A large table, also loaded untidily with books and papers, stood in the centre of the room; many of them were note-books, stored with evidences of the most laborious and patient work; a Cambridge text lay beside them, face downwards, as he had left it on departure. His mother's housekeeper, who had been one of his best friends from babyhood, was the only person allowed to dust his room,—but on the strict condition that she replaced everything as she found it.
He took up the volume, and plunged a moment headlong into the Greek chorus that met his eye. "Jolly!" he said, putting it down with a sigh of regret. "These beastly politics!"
And he went muttering to his dressing-room, summoning his valet almost with ill temper. Yet half his library was the library of a politician, admirably chosen and exhaustively read.
The man who answered his call understood his moods and served him at a look. Ashe complained hotly of the brushing of his dress clothes, and worked himself into a fever over the set of his tie. Nevertheless, before he left he had managed to get from the young man the whole story of his engagement to the under-housemaid, giving him thereupon some bits of advice, jocular but trenchant, which James accepted with a readiness quite unlike his normal behavior in the circles of his class.
CHAPTER II
ASHE took his seat, dined, and saw the Prime Minister. These things took time, and it was not till past eleven that he presented himself in the hall of Madame d'Estrées' house in St. James's Place. Most of her guests were already gathered, but he mounted the stairs with two personal friends of his own—Darrell, the journalist and member of Parliament, and Louis Harman, artist and man of fashion, the friend of duchesses and painter of portraits—a person much in request in many worlds.
"What a cachet they have, these houses!" said Harman, looking round him. "St. James's Place is the top!"
"Where else would you expect to find Madame d'Estrées?" asked Darrell, smiling.
