All the pick of the Tory party came to Vale Royal, shot his pheasants and partridges, drank his rare wines, asked his opinion, and shook his hand. If out of his hearing they still called him a blackguard American, they were now extremely civil to his face, and when he wanted them he had only to whistle. It pleased his love of dominion and his sense of successful effort. He felt that all these noble people, pretty people, fastidious people, all these political chiefs and swell notabilities and leaders of parliament and of fashion, were as so many comedians, all playing for him. He hated them for a great many reasons: for their polished accents, for their way of bowing, for the ease with which they wore their clothes, for the trick they had of looking well-bred even in shabby gowns or old shooting-coats. But he despised them; he could afford to despise them, and they could not afford to despise him. When he thought of this he passed his tongue over his lips with a relishing gesture, like a dog who has been eating a beefsteak. With the world, as with the Duchess of Otterbourne, he had ceased to be suppliant--he had become master; and he had always been a hard master, he had always thought that the best argument was a long strip of cowhide. “Oh, you brute--you unutterable brute! If a look could kill you, you would fall dead where you stand!” thought Mouse one day as she looked from one of the windows of the Bird room, and saw his short broad figure, with the squat legs cased in the gaiters of a country gentleman and the country gentleman’s round felt hat on his stubbly iron-grey hair, as he went over the turf with his back to her, having on his left the lord-lieutenant of the county, and on his right the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, each of them bending their tall forms affably and listening to him with deference. But looks cannot kill; and he continued to walk on across the sunlight and shadow over the grass, and she continued to watch him from the upper windows, convulsed with a deadly loathing impotent rage against him, such as Marie Antoinette must have felt for the gaoler of the Concièrgerie. There were men who loved her to insanity; even in the weary, shallow, indifferent, modern world there are still women who inspire insane if short-lived passions, and she was of those women; but she could not appeal to any one of these men since appeal would entail confession; and confession to one would mean exposure to all, for she knew that her tyrant would be merciless if she freed herself from him, or he would not keep her signatures as he did keep them. Skilled in male human nature, and the management of it, though she was, she had no experience to guide her in dealing with Massarene, because all the men amongst whom she had lived had been gentlemen; and the way of treating women of the gentlemen and the cad is as different as their way of shooting. A man capable of acting as Massarene did could not have been met with in her world.