eakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought
profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was
discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes
and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight
of faery in a forest bewitched.

'Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,' she said, after
listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and
indifference to the union of classes.

'I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,' he turned to her.

'The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?'

'Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.'

'It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have only
one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas, can there
be?'

'So you call me quack?'

'No, Nevil, no,' she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: 'but if
the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your
prescription . . .'

'There's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,' said Nevil, blinking
over it.

She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so
tedious that her father struck through it with the remark:

'Concerning that quack--that's one in the background, though!'

'I know of none,' said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear mention
of the name of Shrapnel.

Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road of
wisdom, might be heard out. She had a reserve entanglement for her
argumentative friend. 'You were saying, Nevil, that you were for
principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham,
the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer to
see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to Mr.
Austin's far superior merits as a politician and servant of his country:
but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a Tory. You are
for the principle.'

'I am,' said he, bowing.

She asked: 'Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by Grace?'

Beauchamp interjected: 'Grace! election?'

Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.

'Thou art a Liberal--then rise to membership,' she said. 'Accept my
creed, and thou art of the chosen. Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from it.
Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.'

'We stick to men, and good men,' the colonel flourished. 'Old English for
me!'

'You might as well say,