"There will be no question about that. They do not like you, but they are afraid of you. The country, on the other hand, likes you a good deal. You have a way with plebeians. I don't know how you manage it. They think you are a practical man, and just now they want practical men, and they intend to get them. But you will have to be very careful about certain things. I wanted to talk to you about those; that was why I sent for you to have lunch with me alone. People were coming, but, in fact, I put them off. We will go to my room." Lady Ardingly rose, and Jack followed her. He was not quite sure that he would like what was coming, but he was far too sensible to quarrel with her, for he considered her quite the worst person in the world to quarrel with. "Yes, I am going to speak plainly," she said. "It is, I think, certain that you will be offered the War Office. Now, you have a very clever wife, who will be admirably useful to you; but you have a great friend who is stupider than a mule, with all her _soi-disant_ brilliance. She is _au fond_ a really vulgar woman, and it is vulgar people who make the stupid mistakes. She has already made one, which might have damaged you seriously, but I do not think it will. Of that presently. I was saying that they will probably give you the War Office; but you cannot with any usefulness retain the post for a day if there is a scandal connected with you--a scandal, that is to say, of the wrong sort." Jack leaned forward in his chair. "I don't know why I do not resent this, Lady Ardingly," he said, "or why I do not leave the room; but I do neither." "Because you are a selfish, or at any rate an ambitious man," she said. "Every one who is worth his salt is. Now I will put names to my advice." * * * * * She paused a moment to take some coffee, and waited till the man had left the room. "Mildred is a very vulgar woman," she said, "and her vulgarity shows itself in the nature of her mistakes. Silly Billy came here the other day, and I asked him about his scene with you. You did not score there, and if he had not been a clever little fellow in a small sort of bird-like manner, you would have involved yourself in a row of monstrous proportions. He managed you in his microscopical way very successfully. That is so. He also told me that it was Mildred who had suggested that absurd canard to him. There is the stupidity of the woman. There was no grain of sense in it all. Nobody who knows, would believe such things about Marie for ten days together. But supposing some gutter-rag of a paper had got hold of it! The wife of the man who was in the running for the Cabinet prosecuting an intrigue with the Liberal candidate of his division of Surrey! How charming! If I had wanted to ruin you, I should have tried to think of something as damaging as that. If I had thought of that I should have been quite content. Did you not see that, my poor fellow?"