ore that day,
whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable
though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must
go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a
situation?--make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not
simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was
inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to
whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him
with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his
private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle;
and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and
colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a
number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the
information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined
ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of
Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious
surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained
his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of birth. After all,
aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men
by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays
is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by
what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of
temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of
"consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political
contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the
future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried;
while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public.
Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and
various sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men
already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work
of England. Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of
personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the
secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly
different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a
kind of unwillingness. Al