“Vulgarity is never artistic,” added the thinker about old tapestry, coming to his brother’s support. “Rowley Drummer has no sense of the unreal. He sees life in all its blinding vulgarity, and therefore the better he paints it, the worse is the result.” Dyke saw that he had gone too far. It is always bad manners to praise one poet in the hearing of another. He tried to qualify his praise. “I do not defend him as an artist,” he explained, “but as a demagogue. I say that the coarse passion called patriotism, in his hands, has been turned to a good purpose. After he has taught the public to acclaim the hooligans of the barrack-room, they cannot very well flog the hooligans of the street.” To the Minister, fresh from his legislative essay, this remark sounded like a challenge. Once more a doubt invaded his mind as to whether all that he was listening to was sheer ribaldry, or whether there were not underlying it some serious purpose, or at least some serious tendency, of which Cabinet Ministers one day might have to take heed. Molly Finucane had been feeling bored for some time, and, what was worse, feeling that her exclusion from the conversation reflected on her position as the lady of the house. She seized this opportunity to assert her prerogative. “Who talks of flogging the hooligans?” she asked, with a good deal of scorn. “They’ll have to catch ’em first.” She stopped short, warned by the uneasy looks of the rest that she had committed herself in some way. Molly did not read the papers, and so was ignorant of the recent proceedings of the House of Lords. But she was aware that Lord Alistair’s brother was identified in some way with the Government, and therefore with the cause of law and order, and she guessed that her expressions might contain some element of offence. There had been a time when Molly would have enjoyed nothing so much as shocking a Cabinet Minister by telling him across her own table that her brother was a corner-boy. But for the past year a great change had come over her disposition, as great as that which transforms the roystering medical student into the serious family practitioner. It had not needed the letter from Lord Alistair’s mother to put before her the idea of becoming Lord Alistair’s wife, nor to teach her the way in which his friends would take such an alliance. To become Lady Alistair without at the same time obtaining the social honours which other Lady Alistairs enjoyed would do little to satisfy that yearning for other women’s respect which is the torment appointed for such as Molly Finucane. And there was enough good in Molly to make her anxious for Alistair’s sake not to be a permanent blight on his career. It was for his sake as much as for her own that she had been striving painfully for the last twelve months to acquire the habitudes of a lady.