To this there was no answer. The balls had, certainly, not broken well as regarded Alderney. Clearing his throat twice, after a more redoubtable pause than heretofore, Lord Rex at length sought a wild and sudden refuge in English politics. He had never in his life talked politics to a pretty woman, reserving his views, which were of the rose-water socialistic school, for after-dinner eloquence among his brother subs. So desperately new an experience as Dinah required desperate measures! To talk well above this young person’s head, thought Lord Rex, who held no mean opinion of his own intellect, might awe her into appreciation. And the subject he chose for his experiment was that of class inequality. The emptiness of all titles, the folly of all social preeminence, were themes on which Lord Rex waxed hot, exceedingly. Perhaps he was sincere. Rose-water socialism, I must admit, did not sit without a certain grace on this sunburnt little dandy, a grace to which his slinged arm, shot through in the forlorn defence of English Empire, gave the added zest of piquancy. Dinah unthawed at once. She broke into talk. In the matter of class differences, Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife held fixed opinions, and could express them incisively. But her ideas were not Lord Rex Basire’s ideas. Lord Rex had got a vast deal of rabid rhetoric by heart, very picturesque rhetoric in its way, and coming from the lips of a duke’s son; Dinah had sharp, clear knowledge, gained at first hand, through the vicissitudes of her own marriage. To Lord Rex social inequality was a party question--kind of thing, don’t you know, that, vehemently taken up, may sometimes land a man, with a following, in the House! To Dinah it was the hidden enemy, the impalpable barrier that stood between her and her husband’s heart. Lord Rex had learnt pages of showy axioms to demonstrate that social inequality should never exist. Dinah’s life was one long, irrefragable, stubborn proof that it existed. ‘Your remarks have a terribly Conservative flavour, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’ When they had talked for some considerable time he told her this. ‘Impossible you can be a Conservative in reality?’ ‘Gaston calls me an old-fashioned Whig. I don’t know the meaning of the word. I only pretend to understand these things in the humblest way, from my own standpoint.’ ‘But you are in favour of the nationalisation of the land? You would do away with the laws of primogeniture? You don’t think a few thousand loiterers, slave-drivers, should hold big estates--for their pheasants--because each elder son, let him be fool, knave, or coward, is heir to them?’ ‘Without such laws where would our English families be, my lord, our barons, and earls, and great dukes, like your father?’ ‘Oh, where they came from,’ said Lord Rex, disposing of the question jauntily. ‘Labour was the original purchase-money paid for all things. You believe that much, at least, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’