with the family, Isabel Fotheringham was no favorite
with the great man. She had long seemed to him a type--a strange and
modern type--of the feminine fanatic who allows political difference to
interfere not only with private friendship but with the nearest and most
sacred ties; and his philosopher's soul revolted. Let a woman talk
politics, if she must, like this eager idealist girl--not with the venom
and gall of the half-educated politician. "As if we hadn't enough of
that already!"

Other spectators paid more frivolous visits to the scene. Bobbie Forbes
and Alicia Drake, attracted by the sounds of war, looked in from the
next room. Forbes listened a moment, shrugged his shoulders, made a
whistling mouth, and then walked off to a glass bookcase--the one sign
of civilization in the vast room--where he was soon absorbed in early
editions of English poets, Lady Lucy's inheritance from a literary
father. Alicia moved about, a little restless and scornful, now
listening unwillingly, and now attempting diversions. But in these she
found no one to second her, not even the two pink-and-white nieces of
Lady Lucy, who did not understand a word of what was going on, but were
none the less gazing open-mouthed at Diana.

Marion Vincent meanwhile had drawn nearer to Diana. Her strong
significant face wore a quiet smile; there was a friendly, even an
admiring penetration in the look with which she watched the young
prophetess of Empire and of War. As for Lady Lucy, she was silent, and
rather grave. In her secret mind she thought that young girls should not
be vehement or presumptuous. It was a misfortune that this pretty
creature had not been more reasonably brought up; a mother's hand had
been wanting. While not only Mr. Ferrier and Mrs. Colwood, sitting side
by side in the background, but everybody else present, in some measure
or degree, was aware of some play of feeling in the scene, beyond and
behind the obvious, some hidden forces, or rather, perhaps, some
emerging relation, which gave it significance and thrill. The duel was a
duel of brains--unequal at that; what made it fascinating was the
universal or typical element in the clash of the two personalities--the
man using his whole strength, more and more tyrannously, more and more
stubbornly--the girl resisting, flashing, appealing, fighting for dear
life, now gaining, now retreating--and finally overborne.

For Marsham's staying powers, naturally, were the greater. He s