"All right, my dear fellow. I daresay I can get my wife to come on your committee, too. That'll help you to rope in the townspeople.... And now, supposing we drop it and have a quiet smoke." He roused himself to one more effort. "Of course, we'll send you a subscription, both of us." Mr. Waddington drove off from Underwoods in a state of pleasurable elation. He had got what he wanted without appearing--without appearing at all to be playing for it. Corbett had never spotted him. There he was wrong. At that very moment Sir John was relating the incident to Lady Corbett. "And you could see all the time the fellow wanted it himself. I put him in an awful funk, pretending I was going to take it." All the same, he admitted very handsomely that the idea of the League was "topping," and that Waddington was the man for it. And the subscription that he and Lady Corbett sent was very handsome, too. Unfortunately it obliged Mr. Waddington to contribute a slightly larger sum, by way of maintaining his ascendancy. 4 On his way home he called at the Old Dower House in the Square to see his mother. He had arranged to meet Fanny and Barbara Madden there and drive them home. The old lady was sitting in her chair, handsome, with dark eyes still brilliant in her white Roman face, a small imperious face, yet soft, soft in its network of fine grooves and pittings. An exquisite old lady in a black satin gown and white embroidered shawl, with a white Chantilly scarf binding rolled masses of white hair. She had been a Miss Postlethwaite, of Medlicott. "My dear boy--so you've got back?" She turned to her son with a soft moan of joy, lifting up her hands to hold his face as he stooped to kiss her. "How well you look," she said. "Is that London or coming back to Fanny?" "It's coming back to you." "Ah, she hasn't spoilt you. You know how to say nice things to your old mother." She looked up at him, at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing--playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close beside his mother, and she was holding one of his big, fleshy hands in her fragile bird claws and patting it. From her study of the ancestral portraits in the Manor dining-room Barbara gathered that he owed to his mother the handsome Roman structure that held up his face, after all, so proudly through its layers of Waddington flesh. He had the Postlethwaite nose. The old lady looked at her, gratified by the grave attention of her eyes. "Miss Madden can't believe that a little woman like me could have such a great big son," she said. "But, you see, he isn't big to me. He'll never be any older than thirteen."