He’ll have had something to say about Carne.”

Lovell saw Carne, a big heavy handsome unhappy-looking man. Under a thatch of thick black hair his white face was not unlike that on photographs of Mussolini, except for its finedrawn sensitive mouth with down-turned corners. He bore little resemblance to Lovell’s notion of a sporting farmer, which was what, by a county-wide reputation, Carne was known to be.

Alderman Snaith, supposed to be the richest member of the Council, a dapper grey little mouse of a man, was more like the secret subtle capitalist of tradition.

“There’s Alderman East just come in,” muttered Syd Mail. “Vice-chairman. Eighty-four. Deaf as a post.”

Snaith detached himself from a gossiping group and made for the vice-chairman.

“Are they friends—East and Snaith?” asked Lovell.

“Friends? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Snaith’s any man’s friend, except when it suits him. He’s clever. Sharp as a sack of monkeys and knows how to make himself indispensable to authority. A dark horse. Ah! There’s Mrs. Beddows.”

“Oh, I know her!” cried Lovell with enthusiasm, then blushed to realise that he had been overheard.

Alderman Mrs. Beddows halted, looked up at the gallery, recognised him and gave a smiling gesture of salutation. She was a plump sturdy little woman, whose rounded features looked as though they had been battered blunt by wear and weather in sixty years or more of hard experience. But so cheerful, so lively, so frank was the intelligence which beamed benevolently from her bright spaniel-coloured eyes, that sometimes she looked as young as the girl she still, in her secret dreams, felt herself to be. Her clothes were a compromise between her spiritual and chronological ages. She wore to-day a dignified and beautifully designed black gown of heavy dull material; but she had crowned this by a velvet toque plastered with purple pansies. She carried a large bag embroidered with raffia work and had pinned on to her rounded bosom the first crimson rose out of her husband’s garden. Actually, she was seventy-two years old, a farmer’s daughter, and had lived in the South Riding all her life.

She was talking about clothes now, in a clear carrying Yorkshire voice, unaffectedly accented.

“Now there’s the nice young man I saw at the Lord Mayor’s reception!” she cried, waving to the embarrassed Lovell. “I told him that if he wrote in his paper again: ‘Alderman Mrs. Beddows looked well in her usual navy,’ I’d have him sacked. It’s not navy anyway. It’s black crepe. Chloe brought it from Paris. Lovely material, isn’t it? But he said he didn’t do the dresses, so I had to chase all over the building hunting for Gloriana or whatever that young woman calls herself, to see she got it right. I always send Chloe the bits out of the papers with my dresses in them. Then she can’t say I never wear anything but my old red velvet, not that I really fancy all these blacks she buys me. I like a bit of colour myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.”

“I see you’ve got off with Mrs. B. already,” said the fat man from the Yorkshire Record, wriggling his massive thighs over the narrow plank of the bench.