“I must be off, Marianne, if I am to catch the train. Saltren, keep the manganese in agitation, I will be with you and set your meeting going. Marianne, I can make no more of your revelation than I can of that disclosed by your husband. Facts, my dear sister, in my business are like the wax figures in Mrs. Jarley’s show. They are to be dressed in the livery of our political colours, and it is wonderful what service they will do thus; but, Marianne, you can’t make the livery stand by itself, there must be facts underneath, it matters not of what a wooden and skeleton nature, they hold up the garments. I can’t say that I see in what you have told me any supporting facts at all, only a bundle of tumbled, theatrical, romantic rubbish.” CHAPTER XVI. HOW SALTREN TOOK IT. Mrs. Saltren, as already said, as Marianne Welsh, had been good-looking and vain, when lady’s-maid to the dowager Lady Lamerton, the mother of the present lord. She had never been in the park with Arminell’s mother, as she had pretended. She had been lady’s-maid only to the dowager, and had left her service precipitately and married Saltren a year before the marriage of my lord. She had been vain, and thought much of; her good looks were gone, her vanity had not departed with them. Her vanity had been wounded by the loss of her husband’s esteem. She had harboured anger against him for many years because of his fantastic ideas, and straight-laced morality. No one is perfect, she argued, and Saltren, who pinned his religion on the Bible, ought to have been the first to admit this. The just man falleth seven times a day, and she had tripped only once in forty-two years—over fifteen thousand days. If she could but raise the veil and look into her husband’s past life, argued she, no doubt she would see comical things there. What if she had tripped? Were not the ways of the world slippery? Did she make them slippery? Had she created the world and set it all over with slides? And if a person did slip, was it becoming of such a person to lie whimpering where she had fallen? Did not that show lack of spirit? For her part, after that slight lapse, she had hopped on her feet, shaken her skirts, and warbled a tune.