Parliament was adjourned on the twenty-third of December, and did not re-assemble until the third of February. The interval was one of great public excitement and of great private anxiety. The country had been assured of a Government pledged to Reform; and, in the main, were waiting as patiently as men, hungry and naked, and burning with a sense of injury and injustice, could wait. But no one knew what hour a spark might be cast into such inflammable material,--that would mean Revolution instead of Reform.
Consequently life was depressed, and not disposed to any exhibition of wealth or festivity; the most heartless and reckless feeling that it would not be endured by men and women on the very verge of starvation. The Queen also was unpopular, and the great social leaders were, as a general thing, bitter political partisans; in theatres and ball-rooms and even on the streets, the Whig and Tory ladies, when they met, looked at one another as Guelphs and Ghibellines, instead of christened English gentlewomen.
Both the Duchess of Richmoor and Miss Vyner were women of strong and irrepressible prejudices; and, before Parliament adjourned, they had made for themselves an environment of active, political enemies. And women carry their politics into their domestic and social life; the Duchess had wounded many of her oldest friends; and Annabel, with the haughty intolerance of youth and wealth, had succeeded in making herself a person whom all the ladies of the Reform party delighted either to positively offend, or to scornfully ignore.
These circumstances, with all her audacity and advantages, she was unable to control. Her brilliant beauty, her clever tongue, her ostentatious dress and display were as nothing against the united disposition of a score of other women to make her understand that they neither desired her friendship nor felt her influence; and she had at least the sense to retire from a conflict "whose weapons," she said contemptuously, "were not in her armory." This condition of affairs naturally threw her very much upon the Athelings for society. While the Duchess sat with a few old ladies of her own caste and political persuasion, talking fearfully of the state of English society and of the horrors Reform would inaugurate for the nobility, Annabel spent her time with Mrs. and Miss Atheling, and learned to look hopefully into a future in which, perhaps, there would be neither dukes nor lords. Besides, Cecil North had a habit of visiting the Athelings also; and, without expressed arrangement, both Cecil and Annabel looked forward to those charming lunches which Mrs. Atheling dispensed with so little ceremony and so much good nature. It had been Cecil's intention to go with Edgar into the country; but when the hour for departure arrived, he had not been able to leave Annabel's vicinity, and, in some of those mysterious ways known to Love, she understood, and was pleased with this evidence of her power.