A voice spoke out of the big armchair.

"We'll do things," said Isabel.

The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish
at last. "What will you do?" he asked her.

"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.

"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.

"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.

"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.

The doctor cocked half an eye at me.

"In some review," the girl went on. "After all, we're not going to
elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
Remington-ite!"

"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"

"In front of Mr. Remington!"

"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor. "Let him hear the
worst."

"I'd like to hear," I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions and
enfeebles the mind."

"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it Mr.
Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle."

"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
windows.

"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"

"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.

"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."

"And you?" said the doctor.

"I'm a good Remington-ite."

"Discipline!" said the doctor.

"Oh!" said Isabel. "At times one has to be--Napoleonic. They want to
libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time for
meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts."

Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.

"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. "Excellent things!
But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about something
called liberty."

"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
from Margaret, and took up the defence. "The old Liberal definition of
liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are
not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed
propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty.
There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly
for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll
give every other liberty for it--until he gets out."

Sir Graham took me up and w