'You go--to all the most interesting ones.'
'Part of my burden! Unlike your new friends, there's nothing I hate so much, unless it is having to make a speech.'
'Well, now, shall I stop "playing at ma'ams" and just say that when I hear a man like you explaining in that superior way how immensely he _doesn't care_, I seem to see that that is precisely the worst indictment against your class. If special privilege breeds that----'
It merely amused him to see that she was forgetting herself. He sat down again. He stretched out his long legs and interlaced his fingers across his bulging shirt front. His air of delicate mockery supplied the whip.
'If,' Vida went on with shining eyes, 'if to be able to care and to work and to sacrifice, if to get those impulses out of life, you must carry your share of the world's burden, then no intelligent creature can be sorry the day is coming when all men will have to----' She took breath, a little frightened to see where she was going.
'Have to----?' he encouraged her, lazily smiling.
'Even under your hard rule I wouldn't have to work much. My appetite is mercifully small.'
'It would grow if you sweated for your bread.'
'Help! help!' he said, not above his usual tone, but slowly he turned his fine head as the door opened. He fixed the amused grey-green eyes on old Mr. Fox-Moore: 'A small and inoffensive pillar of the Upper House is in the act of being abolished.'
'What, is she talking politics? She never favours me with her views,' said Fox-Moore, with his chimpanzee smile.
When Borrodaile had said good-bye, Vida followed him to the top of the stairs.
'It's rather on my mind that I--I've not been very nice to you.'
'Yes, I've been rather horrid. I went and Trafalgar-Squared you, when I ought to have amused you.'
'But you have amused me!' His eyes shone mischievously.
'Oh, very well.' She took the gibe in good part, offering her hand again.
'Good-bye, my dear,' he said gently. 'It's great fun having you in the world!' He spoke as though he had personally arranged this provision against dulness for his latter end.
The next evening he came up to her at a party to ask why she had absented herself from a dinner the night before where he expected to find her.