Lady Casterley lowered the coronetted sheet of paper.  The ghost of a grimace haunted her face—­she had not forgotten her daughter’s youth.  Raising the letter again, she read on: 

“I’m sure Geoffrey and I feel years younger than either Miltoun or Agatha, though we did produce them.  One doesn’t feel it with Bertie or Babs, luckily.  The war scare is having an excellent effect on Miltoun’s candidature.  Claud Harbinger is with us, too, working for Miltoun; but, as a matter of fact, I think he’s after Babs.  It’s rather melancholy, when you think that Babs isn’t quite twenty—­still, one can’t expect anything else, I suppose, with her looks; and Claud is rather a fine specimen.  They talk of him a lot now; he’s quite coming to the fore among the young Tories.”

Lady Casterley again lowered the letter, and stood listening.  A prolonged, muffled sound as of distant cheering and groans had penetrated the great conservatory, vibrating among the pale petals of the lilies and setting free their scent in short waves of perfume.  She passed into the hall; where, stood an old man with sallow face and long white whiskers.

“What was that noise, Clifton?”

“A posse of Socialists, my lady, on their way to Putney to hold a demonstration; the people are hooting them.  They’ve got blocked just outside the gates.”

“Are they making speeches?”

“They are talking some kind of rant, my lady.”

“I’ll go and hear them.  Give me my black stick.”

Above the velvet-dark, flat-toughed cedar trees, which rose like pagodas of ebony on either side of the drive, the sky hung lowering in one great purple cloud, endowed with sinister life by a single white beam striking up into it from the horizon.  Beneath this canopy of cloud a small phalanx of dusty, dishevelled-looking men and women were drawn up in the road, guarding, and encouraging with cheers, a tall, black-coated orator.  Before and behind this phalanx, a little mob of men and boys kept up an accompaniment of groans and jeering.

Lady Casterley and her ‘major-domo’ stood six paces inside the scrolled iron gates, and watched.  The slight, steel-coloured figure with steel-coloured hair, was more arresting in its immobility than all the vociferations and gestures of the mob.  Her eyes alone moved under their half-drooped lids; her right hand clutched tightly the handle of her stick.  The speaker’s voice rose in shrill protest against the exploitation of ‘the people’; it sank in ironical comment on Christianity; it demanded passionately to be free from the continuous burden of ‘this insensate militarist taxation’; it threatened that the people would take things info their own hands.

Lady Casterley turned her head: 

“He is talking nonsense, Clifton.  It is going to rain.  I shall go in.”

Under the stone porch she paused.  The purple cloud had broken; a blind fury of rain was deluging the fast-scattering crowd.  A faint smile came on Lady Casterley’s lips.