possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not
even to you."

"But if you love," I cried.

"To you least of all. Don't you see?--I want to be wonderful to you,
Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart
beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating
faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been
on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful."

"Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had
never faced before.

"It isn't," I said, "how people live."

"It is how I want to live," said Mary.

"It isn't the way life goes."

"I want it to be. Why shouldn't it be? Why at any rate shouldn't it be
for me?"

Sec. 4

I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I
learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and
I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me
vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so
far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my
political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a
poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is
the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of
waiting and practice that would have to precede my political debut.

My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the
idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a
politician. "It isn't in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It's a
pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don't see you succeeding
there, and I don't see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have
to shout, and Strattons don't shout; you have to be smart and tricky and
there's never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to snatch
opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the
realities of every case you touch. You're a paid misrepresenter. They
say you'll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some
thinking for a year or so. There'll be enough to keep you. Write a
little."

"The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end."

"If you succeed."

"If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere."

"And what is the end?"

"Constructive statesmanship."

"Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second glass of
port, and turned over m