Anne longed to fold the arms she knew not what to do with, but apprehending open laughter, held them rigidly to her sides, shooting anxious glances at the opposite mirror. She encountered a battery of eyes. At the same time she heard a suppressed titter. It was only by an effort of will that she refrained from running out of the room, and she felt as if she had been dipped in the hot springs of Nevis. It was at this agonising moment that the amiable Lord Hunsdon presented the chair, with the murmured hope that he was not taking a liberty and that she recalled his having had the good fortune to be presented to her by his friend Mrs. Nunn earlier in the day. Anne, muttering her gratitude, accepted the chair without looking at him, although after he had retired her conscience smote her and she would have made an effort to be agreeable had he lingered. But immediately she caught the drift of a dialogue between two women at a neighbouring table, where the play had stopped, that had beaten faintly upon her ears before she sank out of sight; and in a moment she was conscious of nothing else.
"My son insists that it is my duty to help him, and I am inclined to agree with him," a clear decided voice announced. "And after all he is a gentleman, to say nothing of the fact that time was when he had to hide himself from the importunities of Bath House. But since that unhappy affair--I fear our sex had much to answer for--but he has suffered enough----"
"No doubt!" broke in a caustic voice, "but that is hardly the point. He has taken to ways of relieving his sufferings which make him quite unfit for decent society----"
"He can be reformed."
"Fiddlesticks. No one ever reforms. He merely changes his vice. And he! Mr. Mortlake, who is fond of what he calls the picturesqueness of Charlestown by night, has seen him--well, it is enough that I should have heard. You have been too intimate with the little Queen lately. You never could stand it! Suffice it to say, that brandy, or rum, or whatever he takes by the barrel, makes a madman of him."
"I have heard these stories, but I also know that he only drinks by fits and starts----"
"Worse and worse."
"Well!" in tones of great decision, "since a woman, and a woman of our own class ruined him, Constance Mortlake, I believe it to be the duty of our sex and rank to redeem him. Do you," with high and increasing impatience, "realise that the man is a genius, the poet of the age?"