member that
I am only a newspaper-educated politician. Can't you be a little more
explicit?"

He lit another cigarette and smoked restlessly for a moment.

"I'll try and explain, if I can," he went on. "To be a successful
politician, from the standard which you or I would aim at, a man needs
not only political insight, but he needs to be able to adopt his views
to the practical programme of one of the existing parties, or else to be
strong enough to form a party of his own. That is where I have come to
the cul-de-sac in my career. It was my ambition to guide the working
classes of the country into their rightful place in our social scheme,
but I have also always been an intensely keen Imperialist, and therefore
at daggers drawn with many of the so-called Labour leaders. The
consequence has been that for ten years I have been hanging on to the
thin edge of nothing, a member of the Coalition Government, a member by
sufferance of a hotchpotch party which was created by the combination of
the Radicals and the Unionists with the sole idea of seeing the country
through its great crisis. All legislation, in the wider sense of the
term, had to be shelved while the country was in danger and while it was
recovering itself. That time I spent striving to educate the people I
wanted to represent, striving to make them see reason, to combat the two
elements in their outlook which have been their eternal drawback, the
elements of blatant selfishness and greedy ignorance. Well, I failed.
That is all there is about it--I failed. No party claims me. I haven't
even a seat in the House of Commons. I am nearly fifty years old and I
am tired."

"Nearly fifty years old!" she repeated. "But what is that? You
have--health, you are strong and well, there is nothing a younger man
can do that you cannot. Why do you worry about your age?"

"Perhaps," he admitted, with a faint smile, and an innate compulsion to
tell her of the thought which had lurked behind, "because you are so
marvelously young."

"Absurd!" she scoffed. "I am twenty-nine years old--practically thirty.
That is to say, with the usual twenty years' allowance, you and I are of
the same age."

He looked across at her, across the lace-draped table with its bowls of
fruit, its richly-cut decanter of wine, its low bowl of roses, its haze
of cigarette smoke. She was leaning back in her chair, her head resting
upon the fingers of one hand. Her face seemed alive with so many
emotions