Lord Hartington had
been for some time convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's
appointment; and his conscience was beginning to grow
uncomfortable.
Lord Hartington's conscience was of a piece with the rest of him.
It was not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience--an
intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire;
nor was it, like Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir
Evelyn Baring's, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace
affair. Lord Hartington himself would have been disgusted by any
mention of it. If he had been obliged, he would have alluded to
it distantly; he would have muttered that it was a bore not to do
the proper thing. He was usually bored--for one reason or
another; but this particular form of boredom he found more
intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid
it. Of course, the whole thing was a nuisance--an obvious
nuisance; and everyone else must feel just as he did about it.
And yet people seemed to have got it into their heads that he had
some kind of special faculty in such matters--that there was some
peculiar value in his judgment on a question of right and wrong.
He could not understand why it was; but whenever there was a
dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to him to settle.
It was most odd. But it was trite.
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