MRS. FARRANT. [_Brilliantly._] I think a statesman may be a little inhuman. LADY DAVENPORT. [_With keenness._] Do you mean superhuman? It's not the same thing, you know. MRS. FARRANT. I know. LADY DAVENPORT. Most people don't know. MRS. FARRANT. [_Proceeding with her cynicism._] Humanity achieves . . what? Housekeeping and children. FRANCES TREBELL. As far as a woman's concerned. MRS. FARRANT. [_A little mockingly._] Now, Mamma, say that is as far as a woman's concerned. LADY DAVENPORT. My dear, you know I don't think so. MRS. FARRANT. We may none of us think so. But there's our position . . bread and butter and a certain satisfaction until . . Oh, Mamma, I wish I were like you . . beyond all the passions of life. LADY DAVENPORT. [_With great vitality._] I'm nothing of the sort. It's my egoism's dead . . that's an intimation of mortality. MRS. FARRANT. I accept the snub. But I wonder what I'm to do with myself for the next thirty years. FRANCES TREBELL. Help Lord Horsham to govern the country. JULIA FARRANT _gives a little laugh and takes up the subject this time_. MRS. FARRANT. Mamma . . how many people, do you think, believe that Cyril's _grande passion_ for me takes that form? LADY DAVENPORT. Everyone who knows Cyril and most people who know you. MRS. FARRANT. Otherwise I seem to have fulfilled my mission in life. The boys are old enough to go to school. George and I have become happily unconscious of each other. FRANCES TREBELL. [_With sudden energy of mind._] Till I was forty I never realised the fact that most women must express themselves through men. MRS. FARRANT. [_Looking at_ FRANCES _a little curiously_.] Didn't your instinct lead you to marry . . or did you fight against it? FRANCES TREBELL. I don't know. Perhaps I had no vitality to spare. LADY DAVENPORT. That boy is a long time proposing to Lucy. _This effectually startles the other two from their conversational reverie._ MRS. FARRANT. Walter? I'm not sure that he means to. She means to marry him if he does. FRANCES TREBELL. Has she told you so? MRS. FARRANT. No. I judge by her business-like interest in his welfare. FRANCES TREBELL. He's beginning to feel the responsibility of manhood . . doesn't know whether to be frightened or proud of it. LADY DAVENPORT. It's a pretty thing to watch young people mating. When they're older and marry from disappointment or deliberate choice, thinking themselves so worldly-wise . . MRS. FARRANT. [_Back to her politely cynical mood._] Well . . then at least they don't develop their differences at the same fire-side, regretting the happy time when neither possessed any character at all. LADY DAVENPORT. [_Giving a final douche of common sense._] My dear, any two reasonable people ought to be able to live together. FRANCES TREBELL. Granted three sitting rooms. That'll be the next middle-class political cry . . when women are heard.