As to the scene which had taken place in the drawing-room of the St. James's Square house on Coryston's hurried return home after his father's death, and the explanation to him of the terms of his father's will, she had expected it, and had prepared for it. But it had been none the less a terrible experience. The fierceness of Corry's anger had been indeed quietly expressed--he had evidently schooled himself; but the words and phrases used by him had bitten into her mind. His wrath had taken the form of a long summing up of the relations between himself and her since his boyhood, of a final scornful attack on her supposed "principles," and a denunciation of her love of power--unjustified, unwarranted power--as the cause of all the unhappiness in their family life. He had not said it in so many words, but she knew very well that what he meant was "You have refused to be the normal woman, and you have neither mind enough nor knowledge enough to justify you. You have sacrificed everything to politics, and you don't understand a single political problem. You have ruined your own life and ours for a barren intellectualism, and it will leave you in the end a lonely and unhappy woman." Well, well, she had borne with him--she had not broken with him, after all that. She would have found a dozen ways of improving his position, of giving him back his inheritance, if he had shown the smallest disposition to meet her, to compromise with her. But he had gone from extravagance to extravagance, from outrage to outrage. And finally she had gathered up all her strength and struck, for the family traditions, for the party's, the country's interests. And of course she had been right--she had been abundantly right. Drawing herself unconsciously erect, she looked out over the wide Coryston domain, the undulations of the great estate as it stretched northward to the hills. Politics! She had been in politics from her childhood; she had been absorbed in them through all her married life; and now, in her later years, she was fairly consumed by the passion of them, by the determination to win and conquer. Not for herself!--so at least her thoughts, judged in her own cause, vehemently insisted; not for any personal motive whatever, but to save the country from the break-up of all that made England great, from the incursions of a venomous rabble, bent on destroying the upper class, the landed system, the aristocracy, the Church, the Crown. Woman as she was, she would fight revolution to the last; they should find her body by the wall, when and if the fortress of the old English life went down. _Glenwilliam_!--in that name all her hatreds were summed up.