Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and the tea-table. "The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the Maxwells' particular friends. "Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!" George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been anticipated." "Yes--I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed--alack! The granny--I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman--and the elder girl both work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor--homework of the most abominable kind--that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on." George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions--one of pleasure, one of annoyance--pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be denied--and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter? But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked up quickly. "Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning." Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup. "Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes." "Yes--at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast before. One felt as though one _must_ say everything one had to say about Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath--before one's poor little subject was torn from one--one would never have such a chance again." Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too. "Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady. "But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even _approached_ a Factory Act all the afternoon." Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! _because_, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league--didn't we, Mr. Bennett?--even you joined it." Bennett smiled. "Lady Maxwell overworks herself--we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven to his hostess. "Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her--it's our only hope."